A processing device comprises an instruction execution unit, a memory agent and pinning logic to pin memory pages in a multi-level memory system upon request by the memory agent. The pinning logic includes an agent interface module to receive, from the memory agent, a pin request indicating a first memory page in the multi-level memory system, the multi-level memory system comprising a near memory and a far memory. The pinning logic further includes a memory interface module to retrieve the first memory page from the far memory and write the first memory page to the near memory. In addition, the pinning logic also includes a descriptor table management module to mark the first memory page as pinned in the near memory, wherein marking the first memory page as pinned comprises setting a pinning bit corresponding to the first memory page in a cache descriptor table and to prevent the first memory page from being evicted from the near memory when the first memory page is marked as pinned.