+Compute Express Link (CXL) 3.0 introduces powerful memory pooling and promises to transform datacenter architectures. However, the lack of available CXL 3.0 hardware and the complexity of multi-host configurations pose significant challenges to the community. This paper presents MEMU, a comprehensive emulation framework that enables full CXL 3.0 functionality, including multi-host memory sharing and pooling support. MEMU provides emulation of CXL 3.0 features—such as fabric management, dynamic memory allocation, and coherent memory sharing across multiple hosts—in advance of real hardware availability. An evaluation of MEMU shows that it achieves performance within about 3x of projected native CXL 3.0 speeds having complete compatibility with existing CXL software stacks. We demonstrate the utility of MEMU through a case study on Genomics Pipeline, observing up to a 15% improvement in application performance compared to traditional RDMA-based approaches. MEMU is open-source and publicly available, aiming to accelerate CXL 3.0 research and development.
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