Non-volatile memory (NVM) technologies such as PCM, ReRAM and STT-RAM allow
processors to directly write values to persistent storage at speeds that are
significantly faster than previous durable media such as hard drives or SSDs.
Many applications of NVM are constructed on a logging subsystem, which enables
operations to appear to execute atomically and facilitates recovery from
failures. Writes to NVM, however, pass through a processor's memory system,
which can delay and reorder them and can impair the correctness and cost of
logging algorithms.
Reordering arises because of out-of-order execution in a CPU and the
inter-processor cache coherence protocol. By carefully considering the
properties of these reorderings, this paper develops a logging protocol that
requires only one round trip to non-volatile memory while avoiding expensive
computations. We show how to extend the logging protocol to building a
persistent set (hash map) that also requires only a single round trip to
non-volatile memory for insertion, updating, or deletion