36 Persistent memory #

It is important to note that this form of memory access is not transactional. In the event of a power outage or other system failure, data may not be completely written into storage. PMEM storage is only suitable if the application can handle the situation of partially-written data.

This is useful when you want to use the persistent memory on a set of NVDIMMs as a disk-like pool of very fast storage. For example, placing the file system journal on PMEM with BTT increases the reliability of file system recovery after a power failure or other sudden interruption (see Section 36.5.3, “Creating a PMEM namespace with BTT”).

To applications, such devices appear as very fast SSDs and can be used like any other storage device. For example, LVM can be layered on top of the persistent memory and will work as normal.

The advantage of BTT is that sector write atomicity is guaranteed, so even sophisticated applications that depend on data integrity will keep working. Media error reporting works through standard error-reporting channels.

The ndctl list command can be used to list all available NVDIMMs in a system.

In the following example, the system has three NVDIMMs, which are in a single, triple-channel interleaved set.

# ndctl list --dimms

[
 {
  "dev":"nmem2",
  "id":"8089-00-0000-12325476"
 },
 {
  "dev":"nmem1",
  "id":"8089-00-0000-11325476"
 },
 {
  "dev":"nmem0",
  "id":"8089-00-0000-10325476"
 }
]

With a different parameter, ndctl list will also list the available regions.

Note

Regions may not appear in numerical order.

Note that although there are only three NVDIMMs, they appear as four regions.

# ndctl list --regions

[
 {
  "dev":"region1",
  "size":68182605824,
  "available_size":68182605824,
  "type":"blk"
 },
 {
  "dev":"region3",
  "size":202937204736,
  "available_size":202937204736,
  "type":"pmem",
  "iset_id":5903239628671731251
  },
  {
   "dev":"region0",
   "size":68182605824,
   "available_size":68182605824,
   "type":"blk"
  },
  {
   "dev":"region2",
   "size":68182605824,
   "available_size":68182605824,
   "type":"blk"
  }
]

The space is available in two different forms: either as three separate 64 GB regions of type BLK, or as one combined 189 GB region of type PMEM which presents all the space on the three interleaved NVDIMMs as a single volume.

Note that the displayed value for available_size is the same as that for size. This means that none of the space has been allocated yet.

For the first example, we will configure our three NVDIMMs into a single PMEM namespace with Direct Access (DAX).

The first step is to create a new namespace.

# ndctl create-namespace --type=pmem --mode=fsdax --map=memory
{
 "dev":"namespace3.0",
 "mode":"memory",
 "size":199764213760,
 "uuid":"dc8ebb84-c564-4248-9e8d-e18543c39b69",
 "blockdev":"pmem3"
}

This creates a block device /dev/pmem3, which supports DAX. The 3 in the device name is inherited from the parent region number, in this case region3.

The --map=memory option sets aside part of the PMEM storage space on the NVDIMMs so that it can be used to allocate internal kernel data structures called struct pages. This allows the new PMEM namespace to be used with features such as O_DIRECT I/O and RDMA.

The reservation of some persistent memory for kernel data structures is why the resulting PMEM namespace has a smaller capacity than the parent PMEM region.

Next, we verify that the new block device is available to the operating system:

# fdisk -l /dev/pmem3
Disk /dev/pmem3: 186 GiB, 199764213760 bytes, 390164480 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Before it can be used, like any other drive, it must be formatted. In this example, we format it with XFS:

# mkfs.xfs /dev/pmem3
meta-data=/dev/pmem3      isize=256    agcount=4, agsize=12192640 blks
         =                sectsz=4096  attr=2, projid32bit=1
         =                crc=0        finobt=0, sparse=0
data     =                bsize=4096   blocks=48770560, imaxpct=25
         =                sunit=0      swidth=0 blks
naming   =version 2       bsize=4096   ascii-ci=0 ftype=1
log      =internal log    bsize=4096   blocks=23813, version=2
         =                sectsz=4096  sunit=1 blks, lazy-count=1
realtime =none            extsz=4096   blocks=0, rtextents=0

Next, we can mount the new drive onto a directory:

# mount -o dax /dev/pmem3 /mnt/pmem3

Then we can verify that we now have a DAX-capable device:

# mount | grep dax
/dev/pmem3 on /mnt/pmem3 type xfs (rw,relatime,attr2,dax,inode64,noquota)

The result is that we now have a PMEM namespace formatted with the XFS file system and mounted with DAX.

Any mmap() calls to files in that file system will return virtual addresses that directly map to the persistent memory on our NVDIMMs, completely bypassing the page cache.

Any fsync or msync calls on files in that file system will still ensure that modified data has been fully written to the NVDIMMs. These calls flush the processor cache lines associated with any pages that have been modified in user space via mmap mappings.

# umount /mnt/pmem3

# ndctl disable-namespace namespace3.0
disabled 1 namespace

# ndctl destroy-namespace namespace3.0
destroyed 1 namespace

BTT provides sector write atomicity, which makes it a good choice when you need data protection, for example for Ext4 and XFS journals. If there is a power failure, the journals are protected and should be recoverable. The following examples show how to create a PMEM namespace with BTT in sector mode, and how to place the file system journal in this namespace.

# ndctl create-namespace --type=pmem --mode=sector
{
 "dev":"namespace3.0",
 "mode":"sector",
 "uuid":"51ab652d-7f20-44ea-b51d-5670454f8b9b",
 "sector_size":4096,
 "blockdev":"pmem3s"
}

Next, verify that the new device is present:

# fdisk -l /dev/pmem3s
Disk /dev/pmem3s: 188.8 GiB, 202738135040 bytes, 49496615 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 4096 = 4096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes

Like the DAX-capable PMEM namespace we previously configured, this BTT-capable PMEM namespace consumes all the available storage on the NVDIMMs.

Note

The trailing s in the device name (/dev/pmem3s) stands for sector and can be used to easily distinguish namespaces that are configured to use the BTT.

The volume can be formatted and mounted as in the previous example.

The PMEM namespace shown here cannot use DAX. Instead it uses the BTT to provide sector write atomicity. On each sector write through the PMEM block driver, the BTT will allocate a new sector to receive the new data. The BTT atomically updates its internal mapping structures after the new data is fully written so the newly written data will be available to applications. If the power fails at any point during this process, the write will be completely lost and the application will have access to its old data, still intact. This prevents the condition known as "torn sectors".

This BTT-enabled PMEM namespace can be formatted and used with a file system same as any other standard block device. It cannot be used with DAX. However, mmap mappings for files on this block device will use the page cache.

When you place the file system journal on a separate device, it must use the same file system block size as the file system. Most likely this is 4096, and you can find the block size with this command:

# blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda3

The following example creates a new Ext4 journal on a separate NVDIMM device, creates the file system on a SATA device, then attaches the new file system to the journal:

# mke2fs -b 4096 -O journal_dev /dev/pmem3s
# mkfs.ext4 -J device=/dev/pmem3s /dev/sda3

The following example creates a new XFS file system on a SATA drive, and creates the journal on a separate NVDIMM device:

# mkfs.xfs -l logdev=/dev/pmem3s  /dev/sda3

See man 8 mkfs.ext4 and man 8 mkfs.ext4 for detailed information about options.