Exploration of Non-volatile Memory Management in the OS Kernel

Abstract

Non-volatile memory's future is promising because its performance has been improved significantly. The performance improvement enables non-volatile memory to be a major part of the memory of general purpose systems. Utilization of large non-volatile memory will improve its memory performance because it can decrease the number of the OS's paging activity. To realize these systems, the operating system (OS) needs to manage non-volatile memory in accord with its characteristics. Non-volatile memory has some characteristics, thus the OS should manage this memory with appropriate algorithms. To achieve this goal, we focused on non-volatile memory's characteristics, non-volatile and high-latency, among others. We analyzed the behavior of the OS's memory management and propose how to manage non-volatile memory in the OS kernel. We researched the effect of memory-latency on a system performance and how to manage with hybrid memories.