With the advent of byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVMM), the need for a safe, scalable and high-performing memory allocator is inevitable. A slow memory allocator can bottleneck the entire application stack, while an unsecure memory allocator can render underlying systems and applications inconsistent upon program bugs or system failure. Unlike DRAM-based memory allocators, it is indispensable for an NVMM allocator to guarantee its heap metadata safety from both internal and external errors. An effective NVMM memory allocator should be 1) safe 2) scalable and 3) high performing. Unfortunately, none of the existing persistent memory allocators achieve all three requisites; critically, we also note: the de-facto NVMM allocator, Intel's Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK), is vulnerable to silent data corruption and persistent memory leaks as result of a simple heap overflow. We closely investigate the existing defacto NVMM memory allocators, especially PMDK, to study their vulnerability to metadata corruption and reasons for poor performance and scalability. We propose Poseidon, which is safe, fast and scalable. The premise of Poseidon revolves around providing a user application with per-CPU sub-heaps for scalability, while managing the heap metadata in a segregated fashion and efficiently protecting the metadata using a scalable hardware-based protection scheme, Intel's Memory Protection Keys (MPK). We evaluate Poseidon with a wide array of microbenchmarks and real-world benchmarks, noting: Poseidon outperforms the state-of-art allocators by a significant margin, showing improved scalability and performance, while also guaranteeing metadata safety. / Master of Science / Since the dawn of time, civilization has revolved around effective communication. From smoke signals to telegraphs and beyond, communication has continued to be a cornerstone of successful societies. Today, communication and collaboration occur, daily, on a global scale, such that even sub-second units of time are critical to successful societal operation. Naturally, many forms of modern communication revolve around our digital systems, such as personal computers, email servers, and social networking database applications. There is, thus, a never-ending surge of digital system development, constantly striving toward increased performance. For some time, increasing a system's dynamic random-access memory, or DRAM, has been able to provide performance gains; unfortunately, due to thermal and power constraints, such an increase is no longer feasible. Additionally, loss of power on a DRAM system causes bothersome loss of data, since the memory storage is volatile to power loss. Now, we are on the advent of an entirely new physical memory system, termed non-volatile main memory (NVMM), which has near identical performance properties to DRAM, but is operational in much larger quantities, thus allowing increased overall system speed. Alas, such a system also imposes additional requirements upon software developers; since, for NVMM, all memory updates are permanent, such that a failed update can cause persistent memory corruption. Regrettably, the existing software standard, led by Intel's Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK), is both unsecure (allowing for permanent memory corruption, with ease), low performance, and a bottleneck for multicore systems. Here, we present a secure, high performing solution, termed Poseidon, which harnesses the full potential of NVMM.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/106625 |
| Date | 20 May 2020 |
| Creators | Demeri, Anthony K. |
| Contributors | Electrical and Computer Engineering, Min, Chang Woo, Diehl, William J., Zeng, Haibo |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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