UStore: STT-MRAM Based Light-Weight User-Level Storage for Enhancing Performance of Accessing Persistent Data

Abstract

Traditionally, in computer systems, file I/O has been a big performance bottleneck for I/O intensive applications. The recent advent of non-volatile byte-addressable memory (NVM) technologies such as STT-MRAM and PCM, provides a chance to store persistent data with a high performance close to DRAM's. However, as the location of the persistent storage device gets closer to the CPU, the system software layers overheads for accessing the data such as file system layer including virtual file system layer and device driver are no longer negligible. In this paper, we propose a light-weight user-level persistent storage, called UStore, which is physically allocated on the NVM and is mapped directly into the virtual address space of an application. UStore makes it possible for the application to fast access the persistent data without the system software overheads and extra data copy between the user space and kernel space. We show how UStore is easily applied to existing applications with little elaboration and evaluate its performance enhancement through several benchmark tests.