Integrating memory management with a file system on a non-volatile main memory system

Abstract

Non-volatile (NV) memory technologies have been advanced significantly in recent years. As its performance, including faster access speed, larger capacity, and cheaper costs, improves, it has stimulated the active researches on its use for main memory or storage devices. These researches were, however, conducted independently. The fact that NV memory can be used for both main memory and storage devices means that their management can be integrated. Their integration based on NV memory enables the improvement of system performance because the size of main memory is increased and page swapping needs to be invoked much less frequently. This paper proposes a method of such integration along with its implementation for the Linux kernel. To the best of our knowledge, we are among the first to design and implement the integration. The evaluation results performed by executing Linux on a system emulator show the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed integration method.