A PCM translation layer for integrated memory and storage management

Abstract

Phase change memory (PCM) is known for its potentials as main memory and as storage. In contrast to the past work, this work presents a PCM translation layer that considers how the main memory is used by the operating system together with the usage patterns of storage by trading their performance and reliability. In particular, a joint management scheme is proposed to improve the capability of PCM as both main memory and storage so as to enhance the performance of the entire system. The endurance issue of PCM for main memory is resolved by utilizing the potentially large capacity of the PCM storage space with limited modifications to the existing operating system implementations. Moreover, three commands are proposed to help operating system engineers to take advantage of PCM as main memory and storage by reducing I/O overheads and speeding up both the initialization and termination of program executions. The experimental results show that the performance of PCM as both main memory and storage can be significantly improved with reasonable lifetime, while the system overhead is very limited under coarse-grained wear leveling.