Storage and recovery

Understand what lives in memory, what lives on storage, and what an acknowledgement means.

Lavik keeps a compact key index in DRAM and stores values on files, raw block devices, or SPDK NVMe namespaces.

Worker-owned partitions process requests in parallel. The storage engine appends immutable record versions and rebuilds indexes during startup. An optional clean-shutdown checkpoint accelerates recovery; committed records remain the durable source of truth.

A successful write response is not a synchronous fsync fence. Evaluate durability, replication, and recovery requirements for your workload.

Linux TCP and io_uring are the default backends. Standard packages also include opt-in DPDK/SPDK support. The upstream architecture describes DPDK networking as an experimental standalone serving profile; do not assume the same validation scope for every backend.