Storage in IX: a High Performance Storage Layer for a Dataplane Operating System

As storage hardware evolves, the systems and components which interact with them must adapt as well. Outdated assumptions at the operating system level necessitate a dramatic rethinking of the storage path as emerging storage technology offer performance speeds several orders of magnitude faster than traditional hard disks. This thesis investigates the design space of contemporary storage systems, in particular for non-volatile memory (NVM) technology, and presents a survey of the techniques currently being employed to build systems for NVM. We identify and examine relevant systems to determine features applicable to building a storage extension for IX, a data- plane operating system. We present the design and implementation of such a system and detail the assumptions and principles we strove to incorporate.