Support for new persistent memory instructions

[Andy Rudoff]

As some of you noticed, last week I added support to libpmem for the recently-announced persistent memory support instructions on Intel platforms.

The new instructions are PCOMMIT, CLFLUSHOPT, and CLWB.  You can read about them here:

Intel® Architecture Instruction Set Extensions Programming Reference - 319433-022.pdf

The libpmem man page I sent out in the previous message describes the API we've provided for convenient use of these instructions, along with non-temporal stores.  I also wrote up a little walk-through of some examples using libpmem here: http://pmem.io/nvml/libpmem

Although we hope libpmem is a useful set of routines on top of raw persistent memory, our efforts at this point are really focused on building higher-level transactional libraries on top of libpmem.

Comments welcome, and libpmem itself isn't that long and has a nice big comment at the top explaining how it uses the new instructions -- code review comments on that are very welcome as well!  You'll find the code here: https://github.com/pmem/nvml/blob/master/src/pmem.c

Thanks,

-andy

[Mohammed G. Khatib]

Hi Andy,

Do you know which processor families will support these operations? How much time still for the processors to come out?

Thanks!

Mohammed