Brief Announcement: Building Fast Recoverable Persistent Data Structures with Montage

The recent emergence of fast, dense, nonvolatile main memory suggests that certain long-lived data structures might remain in their natural, pointer-rich format across program runs and hardware reboots. Operations on such structures must be instrumented with explicit write-back and fence instructions to ensure consistency in the wake of a crash. Techniques to minimize the cost of this instrumentation are an active topic of current research. We present what we believe to be the first general-purpose approach to building buffered durably linearizable persistent data structures, and a system, Montage, to support that approach. Montage is built on top of the Ralloc nonblocking persistent allocator. It employs a slow-ticking epoch clock, and ensures that no operation appears to span an epoch boundary. If a crash occurs in epoch e, all work performed in epochs e and e-1 is lost, but all work from prior epochs is preserved. We describe the implementation of Montage, argue its correctness, and report on experiments confirming excellent performance for operations on queues, sets/mappings, and general graphs

Weak persistency semantics from the ground up: formalising the persistency semantics of ARMv8 and transactional models

Emerging non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies promise the durability of disks with the performance of volatile memory (RAM). To describe the persistency guarantees of NVM, several memory persistency models have been proposed in the literature. However, the formal persistency semantics of mainstream hardware is unexplored to date. To close this gap, we present a formal declarative framework for describing concurrency models in the NVM context, and then develop the PARMv8 persistency model as an instance of our framework, formalising the persistency semantics of the ARMv8 architecture for the first time. To facilitate correct persistent programming, we study transactions as a simple abstraction for concurrency and persistency control. We thus develop the PSER (persistent serialisability) persistency model, formalising transactional semantics in the NVM context for the first time, and demonstrate that PSER correctly compiles to PARMv8. This then enables programmers to write correct, concurrent and persistent programs, without having to understand the low-level architecture-specific persistency semantics of the underlying hardware