Practical Whole-System Persistence

Nguyen DT, Giersch O, Preisner T, Kapitza R, Krebs J, Herzog H, Nolte J, Hönig T, Schröder-Preikschat W (2025)

Publication Type: Conference contribution

Publication year: 2025

Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc

Pages Range: 174-188

Conference Proceedings Title: Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference, SYSTOR 2025

Event location: Virtual, Online, ISR

ISBN: 9798400721199

DOI: 10.1145/3757347.3759142

Abstract

Sudden power outages remain one of the biggest threats to losing data, disrupting systems and causing financial damages. Whole system persistence (WSP) has previously been proposed as a solution to mitigate such threats through the use of non-volatile main memory (NVRAM). However, it missed out on external device state persistence and the NVRAM technology used at the time was expensive and limited with regard to their scalability. Today’s NVRAM technologies are both more affordable and offer much higher storage capacities, but are typically slower than DRAM. In this paper, we show how WSP can be attained for general-purpose operating systems using modern hardware. Unlike previous attempts at realising WSP, we discuss and evaluate practical solutions that allow us to also include external devices in our considerations for practical system-wide persistence (pWSP). Despite having the OS and all applications running in slower memory, we are able to show, that specific applications that otherwise have to rely on userspace persistence mechanisms, can achieve up to 2× better throughput and up to 1.5× reduced latency, as well as significantly lower latency variance in general. We further demonstrate, that power outage-related service downtime can be reduced from potentially hours down to just minutes, allowing even network connections to continue seamlessly in many cases.

Authors with CRIS profile

Involved external institutions

Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) Germany (DE) Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus-Senftenberg (BTU) Germany (DE)

How to cite

APA:

Nguyen, D.T., Giersch, O., Preisner, T., Kapitza, R., Krebs, J., Herzog, H.,... Schröder-Preikschat, W. (2025). Practical Whole-System Persistence. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference, SYSTOR 2025 (pp. 174-188). Virtual, Online, ISR, IL: Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.

MLA:

Nguyen, Dustin Tien, et al. "Practical Whole-System Persistence." Proceedings of the 18th ACM International Systems and Storage Conference, SYSTOR 2025, Virtual, Online, ISR Association for Computing Machinery, Inc, 2025. 174-188.

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