Lelantus: Fine-Granularity Copy-On-Write Operations for Secure Non-Volatile Memories

Bulk operations, such as Copy-on-Write (CoW), have been heavily used in most operating systems. In particular, CoW brings in significant savings in memory space and improvement in performance. CoW mainly relies on the fact that many allocated virtual pages are not written immediately (if ever written). Thus, assigning them to a shared physical page can eliminate much of the copy/initialization overheads in addition to improving the memory space efficiency. By prohibiting writes to the shared page, and merely copying the page content to a new physical page at the first write, CoW achieves significant performance and memory space advantages. Unfortunately, with the limited write bandwidth and slow writes of emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVMs), such bulk writes can throttle the memory system. Moreover, it can add significant delays on the first write access to each page due to the need to copy or initialize a new page. Ideally, we need to enable CoW at fine-granularity, and hence only the updated cache blocks within the page need to be copied. To do this, we propose Lelantus, a novel approach that leverages secure memory metadata to allow fine-granularity CoW operations. Lelantus relies on a novel hardware-software co-design to allow tracking updated blocks of copied pages and hence delay the copy of the rest of the blocks until written. The impact of Lelantus becomes more significant when huge pages are deployed, e.g., 2MB or 1GB, as expected with emerging NVMs.