Hercules: Enabling Atomic Durability for Persistent Memory with Transient Persistence Domain

Abstract

Persistent memory (pmem) products bring the persistence domain up to the memory level. Intel recently introduced the eADR feature that guarantees to flush data buffered in CPU cache to pmem on a power outage, thereby making the CPU cache a transient persistence domain. Researchers have explored how to enable the atomic durability for applications' in-pmem data. In this article, we exploit the eADR-supported CPU cache to do so. A modified cache line, until written back to pmem, is a natural redo log copy of the in-pmem data. However, a write-back due to cache replacement or eADR on a crash overwrites the original copy. We accordingly developed Hercules, a hardware logging design for the transaction-level atomic durability, with supportive components installed in CPU cache, memory controller (MC), and pmem. When a transaction commits, Hercules commits on-chip its data staying in cache lines. For cache lines evicted before the commit, Hercules asks the MC to redirect and persist them into in-pmem log entries and commits them off-chip upon committing the transaction. Hercules lazily conducts pmem writes only for cache replacements at runtime. On a crash, Hercules saves metadata and data for active transactions into pmem for recovery. Experiments show that, by using CPU cache for both buffering and logging, Hercules yields much higher throughput and incurs significantly fewer pmem writes than state-of-the-art designs.