Programming Persistent Memory: A Comprehensive Guide for Developers Book

Programming Persistent Memory: A Comprehensive Guide for Developers Book

After many months of hard work by everyone involved, I’m very pleased to announce that the book “Programming Persistent Memory: A Comprehensive Guide for Developers” is now available for download in digital PDF & ePUB formats from https://pmem.io/book , and Kindle & paperback through Amazon .

Beginner and experienced programmers will use this comprehensive guide to persistent memory programming. You will understand how persistent memory brings together several new software/hardware requirements, and offers great promise for better performance and faster application startup times―a huge leap forward in byte-addressable capacity compared with current DRAM offerings.
This revolutionary new technology gives applications significant performance and capacity improvements over existing technologies. It requires a new way of thinking and developing, which makes this highly disruptive to the IT/computing industry. The full spectrum of industry sectors that will benefit from this technology include, but are not limited to, in-memory and traditional databases, AI, analytics, HPC, virtualization, and big data.   
Programming Persistent Memory describes the technology and why it is exciting the industry. It covers the operating system and hardware requirements as well as how to create development environments using emulated or real persistent memory hardware. The book explains fundamental concepts; provides an introduction to persistent memory programming APIs for C, C++, JavaScript, and other languages; discusses RMDA with persistent memory; reviews security features; and presents many examples. Source code and examples that you can run on your own systems are included.
What You’ll Learn
- Understand what persistent memory is, what it does, and the value it brings to the industry
- Become familiar with the operating system and hardware requirements to use persistent memory
- Know the fundamentals of persistent memory programming: why it is different from current programming methods, and what developers need to keep in mind when programming for persistence
- Look at persistent memory application development by example using the Persistent Memory Development Kit (PMDK)
- Design and optimize data structures for persistent memory
- Study how real-world applications are modified to leverage persistent memory
- Utilize the tools available for persistent memory programming, application performance profiling, and debugging
Who This Book Is For
C, C++, Java, and Python developers, but will also be useful to software, cloud, and hardware architects across a broad spectrum of sectors, including cloud service providers, independent software vendors, high performance compute, artificial intelligence, data analytics, big data, etc. 

Source Code

The book uses code examples extensively through many of the chapters to explain how the Persistent Memory Developer Kit (PMDK) library works and how to use it. The code that accompanies the book can be found at https://github.com/pmem/book .

Getting Help

To ask questions pertaining to the book, its code, PMDK, or persistent memory in general, go to https://groups.google.com/g/pmem . You can also join the #pmem Slack channel .

How to build an upstream Fedora Kernel from source

How to build an upstream Fedora Kernel from source

I typically keep my Fedora system current, updating it once every week or two. More recently, I wanted to test the Idle Page Tracking feature, but this wasn’t enabled in the default kernel provided by Fedora.

# grep CONFIG_IDLE_PAGE_TRACKING /boot/config-$(uname -r)
# CONFIG_IDLE_PAGE_TRACKING is not set

To enable the feature, we need to build a custom kernel with the feature(s) we need. Thankfully, the process isn’t too difficult.

For this walk through, I’ll be building a customised version of the Fedora 32 kernel version I already have installed (5.8.7-200.fc32.x86_64), using some of the instructions from https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Building_a_custom_kernel .

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Using the API to Find Free Hosted Models on NVIDIA Builder

Using the API to Find Free Hosted Models on NVIDIA Builder

The NVIDIA Developer Program provides access to a wide catalog of AI models through NVIDIA Inference Microservices (NIM), offering an OpenAI-compatible API. You can browse and discover available models at build.nvidia.com/explore/discover .

If you want to find models with free hosted endpoints in the browser, you can enable the “Free Endpoint” filter on the model catalog page. But what if you need that information programmatically – in a script, a CI pipeline, or as part of an automated workflow? The browser filter is not accessible through the API, and the /v1/models endpoint does not distinguish between free hosted models and everything else.

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How To Install and Boot Microsoft Windows Server 2022 from Persistent Memory (or not)

How To Install and Boot Microsoft Windows Server 2022 from Persistent Memory (or not)

In a previous post  I described how to install and boot Fedora Linux using only Persistent Memory, no SSDs are required. For this follow on post, I attempted to install Microsoft Windows Server 2022 onto the persistent memory.

TL;DR - I was able to select the PMem devices as the install disk, but when the installer begins to write data, we get an “Error code: 0xC0000005”. I haven’t found a solution to this problem (yet).

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