LinuxCon+ContainerCon Europe 2016

Byte-addressable Persistent Memory is an emerging technology expected to soon have a dramatic and disruptive impact on software. Usage of persistent memory requires a different approach to data handling within applications.
In this talk we will examine the primary differences between persistent memory, storage devices, and regular DRAM. We shall present how Persistent Memory is exposed to the OS with ACPI extensions, and describe the resulting changes made upstream to the Linux kernel to provide direct access (known as "DAX" in Linux). We shall present how versatility of Persistent Memory can be utilized by the applications, and what impact does it have on the overall system. Finally, an open source library, known as the NVML (http://pmem.io), providing persistent memory allocation, transactions, and other features useful to applications will be shortly described.