RCache: A Read-Intensive Workload-Aware Page Cache for NVM Filesystem

Byte-addressable non-volatile memory(NVM),as a new participant in the storage hierarchy,gives extremely high performance in storage,which forces changes to be made on current filesystem designs.Page cache,once a significant mechanism filling the performance gap between Dynamic Random Access Memory(DRAM)and block devices,is now a liability that heavily hinders the writing performance of NVM filesystems.Therefore state-of-the-art NVM filesystems leverage the direct access(DAX)technology to bypass the page cache entirely.However,the DRAM still provides higher bandwidth than NVM,which prevents skewed read workloads from benefiting from a higher bandwidth of the DRAM and leads to sub-optimal performance for the system.In this paper,we propose RCache,a readintensive workload-aware page cache for NVM filesystems.Different from traditional caching mechanisms where all reads go through DRAM,RCache uses a tiered page cache design,including assigning DRAM and NVM to hot and cold data separately,and reading data from both sides.To avoid copying data to DRAM in a critical path,RCache migrates data from NVM to DRAM in a background thread.Additionally,RCache manages data in DRAM in a lock-free manner for better latency and scalability.Evaluations on Intel Optane Data Center(DC)Persistent Memory Modules show that,compared with NOVA,RCache achieves 3 times higher bandwidth for read-intensive workloads and introduces little performance loss for write operations.