PMEM-spec: persistent memory speculation (strict persistency can trump relaxed persistency)

Abstract

Persistency models define the persist-order that controls the order in which stores update persistent memory (PM). As with memory consistency, the relaxed persistency models provide better performance than the strict ones by relaxing the ordering constraints. To support such relaxed persistency models, previous studies resort to APIs for annotating the persist-order in program and hardware implementations for enforcing the programmer-specified order. However, these approaches to supporting relaxed persistency impose costly burdens on both architects and programmers. In light of this, the goal of this study is to demonstrate that the strict persistency model can outperform the relaxed models with significantly less hardware complexity and programming difficulty. To achieve that, this paper presents PMEM-Spec that speculatively allows any PM accesses without stalling or buffering, detecting their ordering violation (e.g., misspeculation for PM loads and stores). PMEM-Spec treats misspeculation as power failure and thus leverages failure-atomic transactions to recover from misspeculation by aborting and restarting them purposely. Since the ordering violation rarely occurs, PMEM-Spec can accelerate persistent memory accesses without significant misspeculation penalty. Experimental results show that PMEM-Spec outperforms two epoch-based persistency models with Intel X86 ISA and the state-of-the-art hardware support by 27.2% and 10.6%, respectively.