Pmem
crosvm supports virtio-pmem
to provide a virtual device emulating a byte-addressable persistent
memory device. The disk image is provided to the guest using a memory-mapped view of the image file,
and this mapping can be directly mapped into the guest's address space if the guest operating system
and filesystem support DAX.
Pmem devices may be added to crosvm using the --pmem-device
(read only) or --rw-pmem-device
(read-write) flag, specifying the filename of the backing image as the parameter.
crosvm run \
--pmem-device disk.img \
... # usual crosvm args
The Linux virtio-pmem driver can be enabled with the CONFIG_VIRTIO_PMEM
option. It will expose
pmem devices as /dev/pmem0
, /dev/pmem1
, etc., which may be mounted like any other block device.
A pmem device may also be used as a root filesystem by adding a root=
kernel command line
parameters:
crosvm run \
--pmem-device rootfs.img \
-p "root=/dev/pmem0 ro" \
... # usual crosvm args
The advantage of pmem over a regular block device is the potential for less cache duplication; since
the guest can directly map pages of the pmem device, it does not need to perform an extra copy into
the guest page cache. This can result in lower memory overhead versus virtio-block
(when not using
O_DIRECT
).
The file backing a persistent memory device is mapped directly into the guest's address space, which
means that only the raw disk image format is supported; disk images in qcow2 or other formats may
not be used as a pmem device. See the block
device for an alternative that supports
more file formats.