Transactional NVM cache with high performance and crash consistency

The byte-addressable non-volatile memory (NVM) is new promising storage medium. Compared to NAND flash memory, the next-generation NVM not only preserves the durability of stored data but has much shorter access latencies. An architect can utilize the fast and persistent NVM as an external disk cache. Regarding the system's crash consistency, a prevalent journaling file system needs to run atop an NVM disk cache. However, the performance is severely impaired by redundant efforts in achieving crash consistency in both file system and disk cache. Therefore, we propose a new mechanism called transactional NVM disk cache (Tinca). In brief, Tinca jointly guarantees consistency of file system and disk cache and removes the performance penalty of file system journaling with a lightweight transaction scheme. Evaluations confirm that Tinca significantly outperforms state-of-the-art design by up to 2.5X in local and cluster tests without causing any inconsistency issue.