LiwePMS

Abstract

Next-generation Storage Class Memory (SCM) offers low-latency, high-density, byte-addressable access and persistency. The potent combination of these attractive characteristics makes it possible for SCM to unify the main memory and storage to reduce the storage hierarchy. Aiming for this, several persistent memory systems were designed. However, the heavy metadata and transaction cost degrade the system performance. Moreover, neither of them pays attention to wear-leveling strategy. In this article, we present a lightweight persistent memory system, LiwePMS, which allows a fast access to persistent data stored in SCM with wear-aware memory management. LiwePMS makes performance improvement by simplifying the metadata management and the consistency method. LiwePMS abstracts SCM as heap space with container-based dynamic address mapping. Also, LiwePMS implements efficient wear-aware dynamic memory allocator and lightweight transaction mechanism for data consistency in user-space library. The experiments showed that LiwePMS persists key-value records 1.5× faster than Redis RDB mechanism. LiwePMS improves the performance of persistent region operation by more than 45%, 63%, and 1.1× comparing with HEAPO, Mnemosyne, and NVML, respectively. Also, the wear-leveling policy of memory allocator outperforms that of NVMalloc from 35% to 30%, and the transaction method promotes the transaction performance to 1.8× compared to NVML.