US Patent 10204022 Efficient memory management for persistent memory

Applications may allocate and deallocate persistent objects within transactions used to access persistent data. An allocator's persistent metadata may be lazily persisted when the enclosing transaction commits. An allocator's metadata may be divided into persistent and nonpersistent portions while the heap may be divided into shared and thread-private superblocks. The persisting of the effects of allocation/deallocation calls may be lazily performed and bundled with the enclosing transaction's commit operation related persist barriers. A transaction may maintain an allocation log of the allocation/deallocation calls made by the transaction. An allocation log may be hosted in persistent memory and updated during allocation/deallocation calls. No persist barriers may be used during allocation/deallocation calls. Before a transaction commits, its updates and allocation log may be persisted. Once the transaction has been committed, the allocation log may be applied to the heap's corresponding metadata.