HUNTER: Releasing Persistent Memory Write Performance with A Novel PM-DRAM Collaboration Architecture

We present HUNTER, a POSIX-compliant persistent memory (PM) file system that fully releases PM’s write performance. Compared to state-of-the-art ones, HUNTER proposes a novel PM-DRAM collaboration architecture to significantly eliminate/reduce software overheads in the write path. Expensive in-PM metadata are updated asynchronously to hide their performance penalties. Furthermore, in-PM metadata/data are laid out separately for locality awareness, enabling collaboration with asynchronous architecture. HUNTER also adopts several lightweight in-DRAM allocators/indexes to manage PM efficiently.Experimental results suggest that HUNTER achieves 2.0–3.4× write bandwidth compared to state-of-the-art PM file systems in write-intensive workloads and shows similar write bandwidth compared to bare PM.