Computing really hasn't figured out how to handle non-volatile memory as yet. It's almost always used to emulate rotating disks, with file systems, named files, and a trip through the OS to access anything. Access times for non-volatile memory are orders of magnitude faster than disk access times, so small accesses are feasible. But that's not how it's treated under existing operating systems.<p>There are alternatives. Non-volatile memory could be treated as a key/value store, or a tree, with a storage controller between the CPU and the memory device. With appropriate protection hardware, this could be accessed from user space through special instructions. That's what I though this article indicated. But no. This is just better cache management for the OS.