Patent ID: 11868271
Assignee: ZEROPOINT TECHNOLOGIES AB
Field: Computer technology (Electrical engineering)
Classification: CPC G  H | IPC G

Claim 10:
11. A method for accessing compressed computer memory residing in physical computer memory, the method comprising:
representing compressed memory blocks in said compressed computer memory as sectors, wherein all sectors contain a fixed number of compressed memory blocks such as cache lines, have a fixed logical size in the form of the fixed number of compressed memory blocks, and have varying physical sizes in the form of the total size of data stored in the respective compressed memory blocks;
converting a physical memory access request to a sector-based compressed memory request, wherein:
a sector id is extracted automatically using an address of said physical memory access request,
said sector id is used to determine from sector-based translation metadata the location of a sector in the compressed computer memory,
a compressed address and size of the determined sector are calculated, and
based on the compressed address and size, a sector request is made to the compressed computer memory;

when said physical memory access request is a read request, operating on compressed sector data as retrieved from the compressed computer memory in response to the sector request to:
obtain read request response data from said compressed sector data using the address and a size of said physical memory access request, and
return the obtained read request response data in decompressed form to a source of said physical memory access request; and

when said physical memory access request is a write request, merging data of said compressed sector data as retrieved from the compressed computer memory in response to the sector request with data in said physical memory access request to:
obtain sector-based write request data using the address and size of said physical memory access request, and
store the obtained sector-based write request data as compressed sector data in the compressed computer memory.