WL-Reviver: A Framework for Reviving any Wear-Leveling Techniques in the Face of Failures on Phase Change Memory

Abstract

While Phase Change Memory (PCM) has emerged as one of most promising complements or even replacements of DRAM-based memory, it has only limited write endurance. Because of uneven write distribution, PCM is highly likely to have early failures, which can spread over the chip space and leave the entire chip unusable. Wear leveling is an indispensable technique to even out wear caused by the writes. However, because of process variation early failure cannot be fully avoided. State-of-the-art wear-leveling schemes, such as Start-Gap and Security Refresh, cease to function once even a single block failure occurs because their designs require persistent writ able address space for wear leveling operations. Existent solutions attempting to address the problem demand substantial OS supports, such as explicit space allocations and data migrations. The demand on substantial OS cooperation creates a barrier to widespread adoption of the PCM technique. While fault-tolerance techniques, such as FREE-p and zombie, that remap failed blocks to inaccessible but healthy space have the potential to address the wear-leveling issue by relocating data from failed blocks to healthy ones, they cannot work together with the wear-leveling schemes as data migration may change placement of relocated data. In this paper, we propose a framework, WL-Reviver, that allows any in-PCM wear-leveling scheme to keep delivering its designed leveling service even after failures occur in its working address space. The design is unique on two aspects: (1) it leverages the fault-tolerance techniques so that they can work together with the wear leveling schemes, and (2) it requires no OS supports additional to what're available to today's DRAM-based memory system. Furthermore, WL-Reviver is a lightweight framework of very low overhead. Our extensive experiments show that WLReviver can efficiently revive a wear-leveling scheme without compromising the scheme's wear-leveling effect.