HTMFS - Strong Consistency Comes for Free with Hardware Transactional Memory in Persistent Memory File Systems

Explore a conference talk from FAST '22 that introduces HTMFS, a novel approach to achieving both high performance and strong consistency in persistent memory file systems using hardware transactional memory. Delve into the innovative HOP mechanism, which leverages hardware-software cooperation to overcome traditional trade-offs between performance and consistency. Learn about the FS-aware Optimistic Concurrency Control technique and cooperative locks used to address HTM capacity limitations and ensure progress. Discover how HTMFS demonstrates significant performance improvements compared to existing PM file systems, challenging the notion that strong consistency must come at the cost of performance. Gain insights into the evaluation process, including benchmarks and real-world application tests, and understand the potential impact of this research on future file system designs for persistent memory.