Persistent Memory Was A Popular Topic At This Week's LinuxCon Europe

With Intel's 3D Xpoint Optane technology beginning to appear as extremely fast non-volatile memory and other advancing efforts in the NVDIMM space like ReRAM, persistent memory was a popular topic at this week's LinuxCon Europe event in Berlin.

Persistent memory is about non-volatime memory that retains data while being DMA-capable and offer memory-like performance. There's been a lot of work building up in this space from libraries supporting it to DAX (Direct Access) support in Linux file-systems for use on persistent memory. Several presentations were done this week about the latest tech and Linux support for it.

Maciej Maciejewski of Intel presented on persistent memory usage within Linux, of course with an emphasis on Optane / 3D Xpoint. That Intel presentation from LinuxCon Berlin can be seen here.

Paweł Lebioda of Intel meanwhile presented a tutorial for persistent memory programming with NVML. NVML, the NVM Library, is a collection of libraries for dealing with memory-mapped persistent memory: libpmem, libnvmem, libpmempool, librpmem, and others.

Piotr Balcer, also of Intel, talked about extending existing programming languages with semantics for persistent memory. That presentation is also interesting and covers different efforts for persistent memory support from Python's PyNVM to NVL-C as a C extension with implementation based on LLVM, and others.

Tomasz Kapela meanwhile presented on persistent memory extensions in libstdc++ and libc++. Details on that here.

If you are looking to dive more into Linux persistent memory / NVDIMM support this weekend, you can also checkout pmem.io for more information.