Efficient and Atomic-Durable Persistent Memory through In-PM Hybrid Logging

Abstract

Persistent memory (PM) is promising as it offers comparable performance to DRAM with the durable property of storage devices. It has become a real-world solution with the release of Intel Optane DIMM. The key challenge for PM is to support atomic durability efficiently. In this paper, we propose the first hardware logging mechanism based on two features of Optane DIMM, persistent write pending queue (WPQ) and the DIMM controller. We leverage the persistent WPQ to serve as a redo-log area and augment the DIMM controller to support in-PM undo logging without inducing extra bus traffic. The results show our mechanism is practical yet effective, achieving 59.1% higher throughput than the state-of-the-art logging mechanism.