This is to announce a name change: The NVML project is now known as PMDK, the Persistent Memory Development Kit.

Why the name change?

The old name, NVML, made it sound like the project produced a single library that applied to Non-Volatile Memory. In reality, the project currently supports ten libraries, targeted at various use cases for persistent memory, along with language support for C, C++, Java, and Python, tools like the pmemcheck plug-in for valgrind, and an increasing body of documentation, code examples, tutorials, and blog entries. The libraries are tuned and validated to production quality and issued with a license that allows their use in both open- and closed-source products. And the project continues to grow as we learn about new use cases. So the term Development Kit seems much more appropriate. The new name, PMDK, also follows the pattern of similar development kits like the Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) and the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK).

What is the impact of the change?

The impact is almost entirely isolated to documentation, where we’re replacing the name NVML with PMDK in man pages, examples, URLs, etc. C++ code using libpmemobj will require a small change since the string nvml was used as a namespace. This has been fixed to be the more descriptive namespace pmem and our documentation and example code has been changed to reflect this.

Note that any clones of the NVML source tree will continue to work, since GitHub will map the old repo location to the new PMDK repo location.

What is the future direction for PMDK?

Our future plans have not changed: we will continue to develop, tune, and validate additional libraries and tools for the Persistent Memory Development Kit. We continue to welcome questions, comments, feature requests, and community contributions.