NVCache: A Plug-and-Play NVMM-based I/O Booster for Legacy Systems

TL;DR

NVCache is a transparent, plug-and-play NVMM-based write cache that significantly boosts legacy system I/O performance without size limitations or source code modifications.

Contribution

It introduces NVCache, a novel NVMM-based caching approach that enhances legacy application I/O performance while maintaining transparency and flexibility.

Findings

NVCache achieves state-of-the-art performance for NVMM systems.

It works transparently with unmodified legacy applications.

Provides additional persistence guarantees without size limitations.

Abstract

This paper introduces NVCache, an approach that uses a non-volatile main memory (NVMM) as a write cache to improve the write performance of legacy applications. We compare NVCache against file systems tailored for NVMM (Ext4-DAX and NOVA) and with I/O-heavy applications (SQLite, RocksDB). Our evaluation shows that NVCache reaches the performance level of the existing state-of-the-art systems for NVMM, but without their limitations: NVCache does not limit the size of the stored data to the size of the NVMM, and works transparently with unmodified legacy applications, providing additional persistence guarantees even when their source code is not available.