• The KIPS Transactions:PartA
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• v.14A no.4
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• pp.235-244
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• 2007

Caching and prefetching policies have been used in most of computer systems to compensate speed differences between primary memory and secondary storage devices. In this paper, we design and implement a Flash Cache Core Module(FCCM) on the YAFFS which operates on a file system layer for NAND flash memory. The FCCM is independent of the underlying kernel in order to support its stability and compatibility. Also, we implement the Dirty-Last memory replacement technique considering the characteristics of flash memory, and the waiting queue for pages to be prefetched according to page hit. The FCCM reduced the number of I/Os and the amount of prefetched pages by maximum 55%(20% on average) and maximum 55%(24% on average), respectively, comparing with caching and prefetching policies of Linux.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.15 no.11
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• pp.836-840
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• 2009

Many researchers have studied flash memory in order to replace hard disk storages. Many FTL algorithms have been proposed to overcome physical constraints of flash memory such as erase-before-write, wear leveling, and poor write performance. Therefore, these constraints should be considered for testing FTL algorithms and the performance evaluation of flash memory. As doing the experiments, we suffer from several problems with costs and settings in experimental configuration. When we, for example, replay the traces of Oracle to evaluate the I/O performance with flash memory, it is hard to extract exact traces of I/O operations in Oracle. Since there are only write operations in the log, it is impossible to gather read operations. In MySQL and SQLite, we can gather the read operations by changing I/O functions in the source codes. But it is not easy to search for the exact points about I/O and even if we can find out the points, we might get wrong results depending on how we modify source codes to get I/O traces. The FlaSim proposed in this paper removes the difficulties when we evaluate the performance of FTL algorithms and flash memory. Our Linux drivers emulate the flash memory as a hard disk. And we can easily obtain the usage statistics of flash memory such as the number of write, read, and erase operations. The FlaSim can be gracefully extended to support the additional modules implemented by novel algorithms and ideas. In this paper, we describe the structure of FTL emulator, development tools and operating methods. We expect this emulator to be helpful for many experiments and research with flash memory.