TENET: Memory Safe and Fault Tolerant Persistent Transactional Memory

Byte-addressable Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) allows programs to directly access storage using memory interface without going through the expensive conventional storage stack. However, direct access to NVM makes the NVM data vulnerable to software memory bugs (memory safety) and hardware errors (fault tolerance). This issue is critical because, unlike DRAM, corrupted data can persist forever, even after the system restart. Albeit the plethora of research on NVM programs and systems, there is little attention protecting NVM data from software bugs and hardware errors. In this paper, we propose TENET, a new NVM programming framework, which guarantees memory safety and fault-tolerance to protect NVM data against software bugs and hardware errors. TENET provides the most popular Persistent Transactional Memory (PTM) programming model. TENET leverages the concurrency and commit-time guarantees of a PTM to provide performant and cost-efficient memory safety and fault tolerance. Our evaluations shows that TENET offers the protection for NVM data at a modest performance overhead and storage cost, as compared to other PTMs with partial or no memory safety and fault-tolerance support.