PiCL: A Software-Transparent, Persistent Cache Log for Nonvolatile Main Memory

Software-transparent crash consistency is a promising direction to immediately reap the benefits of nonvolatile main memory (NVMM) without encumbering programmers with error-prone transactional semantics. Unfortunately, proposed hardware write-ahead logging (WAL) schemes have high performance overhead, particularly for multi-core systems with many threads and big on-chip caches and NVMs with low random-access performance. This paper proposes PiCL, a new WAL checkpointing mechanism that provides a low overhead, software-transparent crash consistency solution for NVMM. PiCL introduces multi-undo logging, cache-driven logging, and asynchronous cache-scan to reduce random accesses and enable good row locality at the NVM. The key idea is that: by relaxing the durability timing of checkpoints, crash consistency can be provided with less than 1% performance overhead where 1.5x to 5.0x slowdown was typical with prior work. To demonstrate the feasibility of software-transparent crash consistency, we fully implemented PiCL as an FPGA prototype in Verilog using the OpenPiton framework.