NVCL: Exploiting NVRAM in Cache-Line Granularity Differential Logging

Mingzhe Zhang, Xin Yao, Cho-Li Wang. NVCL: Exploiting NVRAM in Cache-Line Granularity Differential Logging

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Abstract: Emerging byte-addressable non-volatile memory is considered an alternative storage device for persistence guarantee with high performance. In this work, we design NVCL (NVRAM Cache-Line Granularity Logging) and develop it in Redis. The proposed NVCL is designed to exploit cache-line flush granularity of NVRAM to maintain the write-ahead log and to guarantee persistence. NVCL effectively eliminates the excessive I/O overhead of block-based logging. We measured the performance on an Intel machine with a 16 GiB non-volatile dual in-line memory module (NVDIMM). Our performance study shows that NVCL can save up to 127× NVRAM writes and shows 84% speedup comparing to Redis append-only-file logging mechanism. NVCL also reduces up to 50% NVRAM writes and achieves 15% speedup over state-of-the-art logging mechanism NVWAL.