In a joint effort, one SPP2377 project replicated another’s setup for validation and verification purposes.
A modified FreeBSD kernel for NVRAM, brought forward by the PAVE team around Jörg Nolte (BTU Cottbus) and Wolfgang Schröder-Preikschat (FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg) was adapted to and installed on a system at Andreas Polze’s lab (HPI Potsdam, project Memento).
The PAVE team adapted the stock FreeBSD kernel and bootloader to work exclusively with NVRAM by hiding all DRAM from the kernel at boot time and evaluated their implementation on an Optane PM 200 system.
Same experiments and follow-up work can now be reproduced on a Optane PM 100 at HPI Potsdam.
In this process, some minor tweaks to the PAVE code base were necessary to support the slightly different machine and its memory layout, broadening the range of supported hardware platforms.
The responsible Memento researchers, Sven Köhler and Lukas Wenzel, received excellent support by Dustin Nguyen and Oliver Giersch, the original authors of the patches.
This paves the way for a new and close collaboration between the two projects.
Sven Köhler, HPI