Louis Boulanger

Abstract:

Persistent byte-addressable memories are becoming more and more common in computer systems, and for many different contexts. They introduce unique challenges for programmers who wish to make use of NVRAM as a persistent random-access memory, and manually solving these challenges is time-consuming, and adds verbosity and complexity to programs. While persistent memory programming libraries have been developed in the past, they all have advantages and disadvantages, especially the amount of changes they require to conventional programs. We introduce Taenite, a new persistent memory programming library for the Rust programming language, exploiting its unique properties and introducing novel algorithms and techniques to provide users a transparent programming experience with persistent memory. We show in particular how our persistent memory allocator allows for seamless persistence for NVRAM-backed objects, and how Taenite can be used as a drop-in dependency requiring only minor adjustments to allow programs to use persistent memory safely. In addition to testing and benchmarking persistent data structures on a conventional computer system, we also show that Taenite is versatile enough to be used in an embedded context. It allows a very limited embedded setup, with minimal amount of volatile RAM, to use persistent memory in the form of an external SD card and transparently makes available to programmers gigabytes of additional memory. This embedded setup also introduces a new way to reason with persistent memory, with a software-side memory cache that allows low-memory systems to transcend the limits of their memory space.