Better I/O through byte-addressable, persistent memory

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that persistent storage is accessed via a slow, block-based interface. However, new byte-addressable, persistent memory technologies such as phase change memory (PCM) offer fast, fine-grained access to persistent storage. In this paper, we present a file system and a hardware architecture that are designed around the properties of persistent, byteaddressable memory. Our file system, BPFS, uses a new technique called short-circuit shadow paging to provide atomic, fine-grained updates to persistent storage. As a result, BPFS provides strong reliability guarantees and offers better performance than traditional file systems, even when both are run on top of byte-addressable, persistent memory. Our hardware architecture enforces atomicity and ordering guarantees required by BPFS while still providing the performance benefits of the L1 and L2 caches. Since these memory technologies are not yet widely available, we evaluate ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SOSP
• Authors: Jeremy Condit, Edmund B. Nightingale, Christopher Frost, Engin Ipek, Benjamin C. Lee, Doug Burger, Derrick Coetzee
• Keywords: Operating System, Persistent Memory Technologies, Persistent Storage, Phase Change Memory, SOSP 2009