System software for persistent memory

Emerging byte-addressable, non-volatile memory technologies offer performance within an order of magnitude of DRAM, prompting their inclusion in the processor memory subsystem. However, such load/store accessible Persistent Memory (PM) has implications on system design, both hardware and software. In this paper, we explore system software support to enable low-overhead PM access by new and legacy applications. To this end, we implement PMFS, a light-weight POSIX file system that exploits PM's byte-addressability to avoid overheads of block-oriented storage and enable direct PM access by applications (with memory-mapped I/O). PMFS exploits the processor's paging and memory ordering features for optimizations…