pma: A Persistent Memory Allocator

Latest source code

Latest files

pma_sam utility for re-sparsifying heap files

Previous Releases:

Persistent-Memory gawk User Manual

News and History

As of 12 February 2025, persistent-memory gawk is the default GNU AWK on Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.04. However it may be built incorrectly, in such a way that persistence is hobbled. See the Persistent-Memory gawk User Manual for details and workarounds. Bottom line: pm-gawk will work on these popular Linux distributions if you know the right tricks!

See my "Drill Bits" column, episode 7 (ACM Queue magazine, March/April 2022), for a description of pma and its integration into the GNU AWK (gawk) interpreter. See "Drill Bits" episode 14 (November/December 2024) for a description of pma's integration into the GNU bc calculator.

The "Avon 5" release of pma was used in a fork of gawk to create the original persistent gawk research prototype. The "Avon 6" release was later incorporated into the development version of gawk. Official gawk with a persistence feature based on "Avon 7" was released in early September 2022. The "Avon 8" release incorporates a fix for a bug discovered during extensive tests of pm-gawk.