Wamalloc: An Efficient Wear-Aware Allocator for Non-Volatile Memory

Jiashun Zhu, Sumin Li, Linpeng Huang

Abstract: Non-volatile memory(NVM) promises a DRAM replacement in computer systems due to its attractive characteristics. However, the low endurance problem limits its practical applications. In this paper, we propose Wamalloc, an efficient NVM memory allocator to extend the lifetime of NVM in the software level. An elaborate hybrid wear-leveling policy is proposed in this paper to achieve wear-leveling without hardware overhead. The evaluations show that the wear-leveling policy of Wamalloc outperforms that of NVMalloc from 3% to 30%, and the total memory consumption of Wamalloc outperforms that of NVMalloc about 60% and 10% under uniform and random workloads. In addition, the allocation performance of Wamalloc is better than the standard glibc malloc and NVMalloc by 98% and 97% under uniform workloads, 83% and 86% under random workloads.