Practical Uses of Memory Storage Extension

Memory storage technologies are emerging. Battery backed NV-DIMMs are becoming widely available, and the general availability of next generation non-volatile (NV) memory is also considered to be close. While memory storage provides much higher performance than the current block storage devices, such as SSDs and HDDs, its capacity tends to be limited. Such a limitation makes it difficult to adapt memory storage for mass storage; thus, its uses have been limited. Memory storage extension, which we call MSX, is an operating system mechanism that has a file system directly access memory storage and also that virtually extends the capacity of memory storage to that of block storage; thus, MSX effectively utilizes the high performance of memory storage by having a file system directly access memory storage through the synchronous memory interface, and also provides the large capacity by employing block storage as backing storage. MSX was implemented in the Linux operating system kernel. This paper discusses the several practical uses of MSX in cloud computing and also in the fundamental operating system architecture.