Memory carousel: LLVM-based bitwise wear leveling for nonvolatile main memory

Emerging nonvolatile memory yields, alongside many advantages, technical shortcomings, such as reduced cell lifetime. Although many wear-leveling approaches exist to extend the lifetime of such memories, usually a tradeoff for the granularity of wear leveling has to be made. Due to iterative write schemes (repeatedly sense and write), wear out of memory in certain systems is directly dependent on the written bit value and thus can be highly imbalanced, requiring dedicated bit-wise wear leveling. Such a bit-wise wear leveling so far has only be proposed together with a special hardware support. However, if no dedicated hardware solutions are available, especially for commercial off-the-shelf systems with nonvolatile memories, a software solution can be crucial for the system lifetime. In this work, we propose entirely software-based bit-wise wear leveling, where the position of bits within CPU words in the main memory is rotated on a regular basis. We leverage the LLVM intermediate representation to adjust load and store operations of the application with a custom compiler pass. Experimental evaluation shows that the lifetime by applying local rotation within the CPU word can be extended by a factor of up to 21× . We also show that our method can incorporate with coarser-grained wear leveling, e.g., on block granularity and assist achievement of higher lifetime improvements

Software-Managed Read and Write Wear-Leveling for Non-Volatile Main Memory

In-memory wear-leveling has become an important research field for emerging non-volatile main memories over the past years. Many approaches in the literature perform wear-leveling by making use of special hardware. Since most non-volatile memories only wear out from write accesses, the proposed approaches in the literature also usually try to spread write accesses widely over the entire memory space. Some non-volatile memories, however, also wear out from read accesses, because every read causes a consecutive write access. Software-based solutions only operate from the application or kernel level, where read and write accesses are realized with different instructions and semantics. Therefore different mechanisms are required to handle reads and writes on the software level. First, we design a method to approximate read and write accesses to the memory to allow aging aware coarse-grained wear-leveling in the absence of special hardware, providing the age information. Second, we provide specific solutions to resolve access hot-spots within the compiled program code (text segment) and on the application stack. In our evaluation, we estimate the cell age by counting the total amount of accesses per cell. The results show that employing all our methods improves the memory lifetime by up to a factor of 955×