PMEM Persistent Memory Driver Coming For Linux 4.1

After months of work, the Intel-developed PMEM driver has been called for pulling into the Linux 4.1 kernel.

PMEM is short for Persistent Memory and is a new block device driver for persistent non-volatile memory space that's mapped to the system's physical memory space as large physical memory regions. There were competing PMEM driver patches in the past but the kernel developers have now settled for this Intel-developed implementation.

PMEM enables support for non-standard NVDIMMs and ADR protected memory. The new X86_PMEM_LEGACY Kconfig option explains, "Treat memory marked using the non-standard e820 type of 12 as used by the Intel Sandy Bridge-EP reference BIOS as protected memory. The kernel will offer these regions to the 'pmem' driver so they can be used for persistent storage."

PMEM is modified from the Block RAM Driver (BRD). The pull request of PMEM for Linux 4.1 was sent in by Ingo Molnar and can be found on the kernel mailing list.