Persistent Memory Programming in Windows - NVML Integration

Persistent memory (PM) technology provides byte-level access to non-volatile media while also reducing the latency of storing or retrieving data significantly. It creates a new tier between a system’s memory and traditional storage. Any program that is dependent on or scales with quick writes to a persistent medium can benefit from PM.

The purpose of this article is to outline how the non-volatile memory library (NVML) can be integrated into a Visual Studio project for easy use.

Note

Persistent Memory is sometimes also referred to as Storage Class Memory (SCM).

 

PM and NVML

First support for persistent memory was introduced in Windows Server 2016 and the Windows 10 Anniversary Update (1607). For a quick overview, check out these two Channel9 videos:

• Using Non-volatile Memory (NVDIMM-N) as Block Storage in Windows Server 2016
• Using Non-volatile Memory (NVDIMM-N) as Byte-Addressable Storage in Windows Server 2016

To help developers take advantage of the benefits persistent memory offers, Microsoft has also contributed to the efforts of bringing the non-volatile memory library (NVML) to Windows. This library provides various tools to make applications persistent-memory aware. For example, it contains code that lets you easily create a PM-aware key-value store for extremely fast look-ups and stores. You can find more information on NVML, including samples, at NVM Library.

Integrating NVML into a Visual Studio Project

1. Download NVML library files and headers

• NVML is maintained on GitHub. You can either compile the source yourself, or just download compiled binaries directly from here: NVML Version 1.2 - Windows Technical Preview.

2. Place the library files and headers in a directory of your choosing, for example: “C:\NVML\lib” and “C:\NVML\inc” respectively.

3. Configure your project as follows:

• Open your visual studio project and in the “Solution Explorer” right-click on your project’s name.
• Open the project’s setting pane at the bottom of the resulting pop-up.
• Navigate to “Configuration Properties -> C/C++” and add the folder in which you stored the header (C:\NVML\inc) to the “Additional Include Directories” field.
• Next, navigate to “Configuration Properties -> Linker” and add the folder in which you stored the library (C:\NVML\lib) to the “Additional Library Directories” field

4. Next, make sure you target the project for Windows Server 2016 or Windows 10 Anniversary Update:

• Navigate to “Configuration Properties -> General” and set the “Target Platform Version” field to “10.0.14393.0” and
• Navigate to “Configuration Properties -> C/C++” and add “NTDDI_VERSION=NTDDI_WIN10_RS1;” to the “Preprocessor” field.

5. Include the headers in your code and link to the required libraries

• At this point, you can simply include the header files you are looking to use in your code like any other header files. For example, to use libpmem:
  • add "#include <libpmem.h>" and
  • add "libpmem.lib" to "Configuration Properties -> Linker -> Input -> Additional Dependencies"

At this point you are ready to call the library’s functions directly in your code and take advantage of them.