Poseidon
Anthony Demeri, Wook-Hee Kim, R. Madhava Krishnan, Jaeho Kim, Mohannad Ismail, Changwoo Min · 2020
Persistent memory allocator is an essential component of any Non-Volatile Main Memory (NVMM) application. A slow memory allocator can bottleneck the entire application stack, while an unsecure memory allocator can render applications inconsistent upon program bugs or system failure. Unlike DRAM-based memory allocators, it is indispensable for an NVMM allocator to guarantee its heap metadata safety from both internal and external errors. An effective NVMM memory allocator should be 1) safe, 2) scalable, and 3) high performing. Unfortunately, none of the existing persistent memory allocators achieve all three requisites. For example, we found that even Intel's de-facto NVMM allocator-libpmemobj is vulnerable to silent data corruption and persistent memory leaks resulting from a simple heap overflow.