Silent Shredder

Abstract

As non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies are expected to replace DRAM in the near future, new challenges have emerged. For example, NVMs have slow and power-consuming writes, and limited write endurance. In addition, NVMs have a data remanence vulnerability, i.e., they retain data for a long time after being powered off. NVM encryption alleviates the vulnerability, but exacerbates the limited endurance by increasing the number of writes to memory. We observe that, in current systems, a large percentage of main memory writes result from data shredding in operating systems, a process of zeroing out physical pages before mapping them to new processes, in order to protect previous processes' data. In this paper, we propose Silent Shredder, which repurposes initialization vectors used in standard counter mode encryption to completely eliminate the data shredding writes. Silent Shredder also speeds up reading shredded cache lines, and hence reduces power consumption and improves overall performance. To evaluate our design, we run three PowerGraph applications and 26 multi-programmed workloads from the SPEC 2006 suite, on a gem5-based full system simulator. Silent Shredder eliminates an average of 48.6% of the writes in the initialization and graph construction phases. It speeds up main memory reads by 3.3 times, and improves the number of instructions per cycle (IPC) by 6.4% on average. Finally, we discuss several use cases, including virtual machines' data isolation and user-level large data initialization, where Silent Shredder can be used effectively at no extra cost.