A survey of operating system support for persistent memory

Abstract

Emerging persistent memory technologies, like PCM and 3D XPoint, offer numerous advantages, such as higher density, larger capacity, and better energy efficiency, compared with the DRAM. However, they also have some drawbacks, e.g., slower access speed, limited write endurance, and unbalanced read/write latency. Persistent memory technologies provide both great opportunities and challenges for operating systems. As a result, a large number of solutions have been proposed. With the increasing number and complexity of problems and approaches, we believe this is the right moment to investigate and analyze these works systematically. To this end, we perform a comprehensive and in-depth study on operating system support for persistent memory within three steps. First, we present an overview of how to build the operating system on persistent memory from three perspectives: system abstraction, crash consistency, and system reliability. Then, we classify the existing research works into three categories: storage stack, memory manager, and OS-bypassing library. For each category, we summarize the major research topics and discuss these topics deeply. Specifically, we present the challenges and opportunities in each topic, describe the contributions and limitations of proposed approaches, and compare these solutions in different dimensions. Finally, we also envision the future operating system based on this study.