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NAME

libpmem2_unsafe_shutdown - libpmem2 unsafe shutdown

DESCRIPTION

In systems with the persistent memory support, a power-fail protected domain covers a set of resources from which the platform will flush data to the persistent medium in case of a power-failure. Data stored on the persistent medium is preserved across power cycles.

The hardware guarantees the feature to flush all data stored in the power-fail protected domain to the persistent medium. However, nothing is infallible, and Persistent Memory hardware can expose a monotonically increasing unsafe shutdown counter (USC) that is incremented every time a failure of the mechanism above is detected. This allows software to discover situations where a running application was interrupted by a power failure that led to an unsafe shutdown. Undiscovered unsafe shutdowns might cause silent data corruption.

    Note: The unsafe shutdown may corrupt data stored on a device, in a file, in a set of files, and a mapping spanning only a part of a file. For the sake of simplicity, all of the above cases will be called file below.

UNSAFE SHUTDOWN DETECTION

Software can detect an unsafe shutdown by watching for the change between unsafe shutdown count value across application startups. Any changes can be indicative of unsafe shutdown occurrence.

Applications can implement a detection mechanism by storing the USC retrieved from pmem2_source_device_usc(3) in Persistent Memory. Then, on subsequent startups, the stored value must be compared with a newly retrieved one.

However, this detection method can result in false-positives. Moving the file to different Persistent Memory devices with possibly different USC values would lead to false unsafe shutdown detection.

Additionally, relying on USC value alone could result in the detection of unsafe shutdown events that occur when such a shutdown has no chance of impacting the data used by the application, e.g., when nothing is actively using the file.

Applications can avoid false-positives associated with moving the file by storing device identification, obtained through pmem2_source_device_id(3), alongside the USC. This enables the software to check if the underlying device has changed, and reinitialize the stored USC in such cases.

The second behavior, detection of possibly irrelevant unsafe shutdown events, if undesirable, can be prevented by storing a flag indicating whether the file is in use, alongside all the rest of the relevant information.

The application should use pmem2_deep_flush(3) when storing any data related to unsafe shutdown detection for higher reliability. This helps ensure that the detection mechanism is not reliant on the correct functioning of the same hardware features it is designed to safeguard.

General-purpose software should not assume the presence of USC on the platform, and should instead appropriately handle any PMEM2_E_NOSUPP it encounters. Doing otherwise might cause the software to be unnecessarily restrictive about the hardware it supports and would prevent, e.g., testing on emulated PMEM.

SEE ALSO

pmem2_deep_flush(3), pmem2_persist_fn(3), pmem2_source_device_id(3), pmem2_source_device_usc(3) and <https://pmem.io>