Lewat: A Lightweight, Efficient, and Wear-Aware Transactional Persistent Memory System

Emerging non-volatile memory (also termed as persistent memory, PM) technologies promise persistence, byte-addressability, and DRAM-like read/write latency. A proliferation of persistent memory systems have been proposed to leverage PM for fast data persistence and expose malloc-like persistent APIs. By eliminating disk I/Os, these systems gain low-latency and high-throughput access performance for persistent data. However, there still exist non-negligible limitations in these systems, such as frequent context switches, inefficient allocation, heavy logging overhead, and lack of wear-leveling techniques. To solve these problems, we develop Lewat, a lightweight, efficient, and wear-aware transactional persistent memory system. Lewat is built in user-layer to avoid kernel/user layer context switches and enables lightweight persistent data access. We decouple the data space into slot zone and page zone. Based on this, we design different allocators in these two zones to achieve efficient allocation performance for both small-sized data and large-sized data. To minimize logging overhead, we propose an efficient adaptive logging framework. The main idea is to utilize different logging techniques for different workloads. We also propose a suite of system-coupled wear-leveling techniques that contain wear-aware allocation, wear-aware update, and write reduction. We evaluate Lewat on a real non-volatile memory platform and the experimental results show that compared with state-of-the-art persistent memory systems, Lewat has much lower latency and higher throughput.