Options for NVDIMM usage in MariaDB

Hardware for NVDIMM plans to provide RAM speed access for byte addressable persistent memory. Linux kernel and userspace supporting libraries (http://pmem.io/nvml/) are providing vendor independent interfaces for using the hardware. As far as I can tell these devices are in the multiple GB size and may extend to what is currently disk size.

NVML library is a BSD-3 licensed product containing various useful APIs.

Options for integrating NVDIMM's features into the current MariaDB implementation include:

1. Use a binary log space (probably the lowest benefit but easy to implement)
2. Create a new storage engine for NVDIMM (probably most beneficial but hardest to implement)
3. Innodb: Using NVDIMM as innodb log buffer could eliminate the need for a innodb log file implementation
4. Innodb: Using buffer pool as NVDIMM (as mechanism to simplify innodb_buffer_pool_dump*/innodb_buffer_pool_restore*)
5. Innodb: Using tablespaces on NVDIMM (MySQL-5.7 appears to have partition table spaces)
6. Innodb: Table option that specifies a NVDIMM location as a tablespace
7. Innodb: partitions can specify NVDIMM tablespace - keep frequent partition only in NVDIMM
8. MyISAM: sorting MYD and/or MYI files in NVDIMM as per CREATE TABLE options or INDEX options