Byte-addressable Persistent Memory, in the form of a DIMM, is an emerging technology expected to soon have a dramatic and disruptive impact on server software. Usage of persistent memory as a storage replacement attached directly to a memory controller, requires a different approach to data handling within the kernel and applications that use it.

In this talk we will examine the primary differences between persistent memory, storage devices, and regular DRAM. We shall present how Persistent Memory is exposed to the OS with ACPI 6.0 extensions, and describe the resulting changes made upstream to the Linux kernel to provide direct access (known as "DAX" in Linux). Finally, an open source library, known as the NVM Library (http://pmem.io), providing persistent memory allocation, transactions, and other features useful to high-performance storage applications will be described.