WAlloc: An efficient wear-aware allocator for non-volatile main memory

Abstract

The non-volatile memory (NVM) has the illustrious merits of byte-addressability, fast speed, persistency and low power consumption, which make it attractive to be used as main memory. Commonly, user process dynamically acquires memory through memory allocators. However, traditional memory allocators designed with in-place data writes are not appropriate for non-volatile main memory (NVRAM) due to the limited endurance. For instance, the number of write operations is merely 108 times per PCM cell. In this paper, we quantitatively analyze the wear-oblivious of DRAM-oriented designed allocator—glibc malloc and the inefficiency of wear-conscious allocator—NVMalloc. For example, the average imbalance factor (the maximum/the average) of memory allocation is about 7.5 and 3, respectively. Based on our observations, we propose WAlloc, an efficient wear-aware manual memory allocator designed for NVRAM, decouples metadata and data, uses Less Allocated First Out allocation policy and redirects the data writes. Experimental results show that the wear-leveling of WAlloc outperforms that of NVMalloc about 30% and 60% under random workloads and well-distributed workloads, respectively. In addition, considering the trade-off between space and wear-leveling, WAlloc reduces average data memory writes in 64 bytes block by average 1.5X comparing with malloc with almost 8% extra space overhead.