vista-recoverable-memory · research · also Rio Vista, Vista transaction library

Vista recoverable memory

Vista is a research recoverable-memory library that adds failure-atomic transactions to the persistent-memory abstraction provided by the Rio file cache.

Related Observatory article: Vista recoverable memory on hesela.com

Vista retains before-images of the transaction's tracked memory ranges in a Rio-backed undo log before mapped updates; commit discards them and recovery rolls back uncommitted transactions. Eliminating redo logging does not eliminate undo logging. [1]

Concurrency control belongs to the application. Larger-than-memory data remain supported, but thrashing can hurt performance; fitting in RAM is not a correctness requirement. [2]

Rio targets software-crash recovery; its 1996 experiments excluded power outages. Vista is not a guarantee that unprotected DRAM survives power loss. [3]

Relations

related

Rio file cache, Crash consistency, Write-ahead log

Limitations

• Historical design, not a current deployment recommendation or a reproduced Hesela benchmark. [1]

Citations

1. Lowell and Chen. Free Transactions with Rio Vista. SOSP 1997, section 4, PDF p. 4. (accessed 2026-11-09)
2. Rio project authors: Questions about Vista, concurrency and working-set size. (accessed 2026-11-09)
3. Chen et al. The Rio File Cache: Surviving Operating System Crashes. ASPLOS VII 1996, section 1. (accessed 2026-11-09)

Further reading

4. Hesela: Surviving bytes are not an atomic transaction. (accessed 2026-11-09)

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