Emerging persistent memory technologies, like PCM and 3D XPoint, offer numerous advantages, such as higher density, larger capacity, and better energy efficiency, compared with the DRAM. However, they also have some drawbacks, e.g., slower access speed, limited write endurance, and unbalanced read/write latency. Persistent memory technologies provide both great opportunities and challenges for operating systems. As a result, a large number of solutions have been proposed. With the increasing number and complexity of problems and approaches, we believe this is the right moment to investigate and analyze these works systematically.

To this end, we perform a comprehensive and in-depth study on operating system support for persistent memory within three steps. First, we present an overview of how to build the operating system on persistent memory from three perspectives: system abstraction, crash consistency, and system reliability. Then, we classify the existing research works into three categories: storage stack, memory manager, and OS-bypassing library. For each category, we summarize the major research topics and discuss these topics deeply. Specifically, we present the challenges and opportunities in each topic, describe the contributions and limitations of proposed approaches, and compare these solutions in different dimensions. Finally, we also envision the future operating system based on this study.

与DRAM相比，诸如PCM和3D XPoint之类的新兴持久性存储技术具有许多优势，例如更高的密度，更大的容量以及更好的能源效率。但是，它们也有一些缺点，例如访问速度较慢，写耐久性有限以及读/写延迟不平衡。持久性存储技术为操作系统带来了巨大的机遇和挑战。结果，提出了许多解决方案。随着问题和方法数量的增加和复杂性的增加，我们认为这是系统地调查和分析这些工作的正确时机。

为此，我们通过三个步骤对操作系统对持久性内存的支持进行了全面而深入的研究。首先，我们从三个角度概述了如何在持久性内存上构建操作系统：系统抽象，崩溃一致性和系统可靠性。然后，我们将现有的研究工作分为三类：存储堆栈，内存管理器和OS绕过库。对于每个类别，我们总结了主要的研究主题，并深入讨论了这些主题。具体而言，我们介绍了每个主题中的挑战和机遇，描述了所提出方法的贡献和局限性，并在不同维度上比较了这些解决方案。最后，我们还根据此研究展望了未来的操作系统。