The Design and Implementation of a Lightweight Management Framework for Non-volatile Memory

摘要

The disk is always the bottleneck of storage system for decades. The emergency of non-volatile memory, such as Phase Change Memory, Spin-Transfer Torque and Memristors provides an opportunity to improve the performance of storage system due to its comparable access speed like DRAM. However, existing storage systems are designed and optimized for disk, directly replacing disk with the non-volatile memory will make the software latency become the major bottleneck. In order to address the problem and to improve the performance of non-volatile memory based system, we design and implement a lightweight management framework for non-volatile memory. The framework is composed of a user-level library and a kernel-level file system for non-volatile memory, called NVMFS. Unlike current storage systems, the framework provides a relative short I/O path and a dedicated file system for non-volatile memory. The upper-level applications can load library dynamically in the framework to access NVMFS on non-volatile memory. We have implemented the prototype of the framework in Linux kernel and evaluated the performance of the framework through the standard benchmark.