• Title/Summary/Keyword: Host-level Flash Translation Layer

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Implementation of Memory Efficient Flash Translation Layer for Open-channel SSDs

  • Oh, Gijun;Ahn, Sungyong
    • International journal of advanced smart convergence
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    • v.10 no.1
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    • pp.142-150
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    • 2021
  • Open-channel SSD is a new type of Solid-State Disk (SSD) that improves the garbage collection overhead and write amplification due to physical constraints of NAND flash memory by exposing the internal structure of the SSD to the host. However, the host-level Flash Translation Layer (FTL) provided for open-channel SSDs in the current Linux kernel consumes host memory excessively because it use page-level mapping table to translate logical address to physical address. Therefore, in this paper, we implemente a selective mapping table loading scheme that loads only a currently required part of the mapping table to the mapping table cache from SSD instead of entire mapping table. In addition, to increase the hit ratio of the mapping table cache, filesystem information and mapping table access history are utilized for cache replacement policy. The proposed scheme is implemented in the host-level FTL of the Linux kernel and evaluated using open-channel SSD emulator. According to the evaluation results, we can achieve 80% of I/O performance using the only 32% of memory usage compared to the previous host-level FTL.

Optimizing Garbage Collection Overhead of Host-level Flash Translation Layer for Journaling Filesystems

  • Son, Sehee;Ahn, Sungyong
    • International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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    • v.13 no.2
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    • pp.27-35
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    • 2021
  • NAND flash memory-based SSD needs an internal software, Flash Translation Layer(FTL) to provide traditional block device interface to the host because of its physical constraints, such as erase-before-write and large erase block. However, because useful host-side information cannot be delivered to FTL through the narrow block device interface, SSDs suffer from a variety of problems such as increasing garbage collection overhead, large tail-latency, and unpredictable I/O latency. Otherwise, the new type of SSD, open-channel SSD exposes the internal structure of SSD to the host so that underlying NAND flash memory can be managed directly by the host-level FTL. Especially, I/O data classification by using host-side information can achieve the reduction of garbage collection overhead. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to reduce garbage collection overhead of open-channel SSD by separating the journal from other file data for the journaling filesystem. Because journal has different lifespan with other file data, the Write Amplification Factor (WAF) caused by garbage collection can be reduced. The proposed scheme is implemented by modifying the host-level FTL of Linux and evaluated with both Fio and Filebench. According to the experiment results, the proposed scheme improves I/O performance by 46%~50% while reducing the WAF of open-channel SSDs by more than 33% compared to the previous one.

Anticipatory I/O Management for Clustered Flash Translation Layer in NAND Flash Memory

  • Park, Kwang-Hee;Yang, Jun-Sik;Chang, Joon-Hyuk;Kim, Deok-Hwan
    • ETRI Journal
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    • v.30 no.6
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    • pp.790-798
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    • 2008
  • Recently, NAND flash memory has emerged as a next generation storage device because it has several advantages, such as low power consumption, shock resistance, and so on. However, it is necessary to use a flash translation layer (FTL) to intermediate between NAND flash memory and conventional file systems because of the unique hardware characteristics of flash memory. This paper proposes a new clustered FTL (CFTL) that uses clustered hash tables and a two-level software cache technique. The CFTL can anticipate consecutive addresses from the host because the clustered hash table uses the locality of reference in a large address space. It also adaptively switches logical addresses to physical addresses in the flash memory by using block mapping, page mapping, and a two-level software cache technique. Furthermore, anticipatory I/O management using continuity counters and a prefetch scheme enables fast address translation. Experimental results show that the proposed address translation mechanism for CFTL provides better performance in address translation and memory space usage than the well-known NAND FTL (NFTL) and adaptive FTL (AFTL).

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A Multi-Level Flash Translation Layer for Large Capacity Solid State Drives

  • Kim, Yong-Seok
    • Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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    • v.26 no.2
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    • pp.11-18
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    • 2021
  • The flash translation layer(FTL) of SSD maps the logical page number requested from the host to the actual recorded flash memory page number. It is very important to reduce the amount of RAM used to manage the mapping information. In the existing demand-based FTLs, two-level method is applied in which mapping information is also recorded in flash memory pages and only their addresses are managed as a table in RAM. As the capacities of SSDs are growing to tens of terabytes, the amount of RAM for mapping table becomes too large. In this paper, ML-FTL was proposed as a method of managing mapping information in three levels to reduce the amount of RAM required drastically. From an evaluation, the increase in overhead was minimal compared to the conventional two-level method by properly utilizing cache.