Arcadia: A Fast and Reliable Persistent Memory Replicated Log

TL;DR

Arcadia is a novel replicated log system for persistent memory that simplifies programming, ensures data durability, and significantly outperforms existing logs like libpmemlog, FLEX, and Query Fresh.

Contribution

Arcadia introduces a generic, high-performance replicated log design that abstracts PMEM idiosyncrasies and guarantees crash consistency with novel concurrency and durability primitives.

Findings

Arcadia outperforms existing PMEM logs by several times.

It provides stronger durability guarantees.

It reduces programmer burden significantly.

Abstract

The performance properties of byte-addressable persistent memory (PMEM) have the potential to significantly improve system performance over a wide spectrum of applications. But persistent memory brings considerable new challenges to the programmer: only 8-byte write atomicity, out of order flush and availability limited by node failure. It's possible to work with the atomicity and ordering constraints of PMEM directly by carefully sequencing the order of store operations and inserting explicit flush and fence operations at each ordering point. But this is tedious and error-prone: too many flush operations defeat the performance benefits of PMEM, and even with generous use, it is difficult to prove that a given program is crash-consistent. Logging is a great abstraction to deal with these issues but prior work on PMEM logging has not successfully hidden the idiosyncrasies of PMEM. Moreover, shortcomings in the log interface and design have prevented attainment of full PMEM performance. We believe that a log design that hides the idiosyncrasies from programmers while delivering full performance is key to success. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of Arcadia, a generic replicated log on PMEM to address these problems. Arcadia handles atomicity, integrity, and replication of log records to reduce programmer burden. Our design has several novel aspects including concurrent log writes with in-order commit, atomicity and integrity primitives for local and remote PMEM writes, and a frequency-based log force policy for providing low overhead persistence with guaranteed bounded loss of uncommitted records. Our evaluation shows that Arcadia outperforms state-of-the-art PMEM logs, such as PMDK's libpmemlog, FLEX, and Query Fresh by several times while providing stronger log record durability guarantees. We expect Arcadia to become the leading off-the-shelf PMEM log design.