NVCache: a plug-and-play NVMM-based I/O booster for legacy systems

Abstract : This paper introduces NVCACHE, an approach that uses a non-volatile main memory (NVMM) as a write cache to improve the write performance of legacy applications. We compare NVCACHE against file systems tailored for NVMM (Ext4-DAX and NOVA) and with I/O-heavy applications (SQLite, RocksDB). Our evaluation shows that NVCACHE reaches the performance level of the existing state-of-the-art systems for NVMM, but without their limitations: NVCACHE does not limit the size of the stored data to the size of the NVMM, and works transparently with unmodified legacy applications, providing additional persistence guarantees even when their source code is not available.