An NVM-based Efficient Write-Reduction Scheme for Block Device Driver Performance Improvement

Junghan Kim, Young Ik Eom

http://doi.org/10.5626/JOK.2019.46.10.981

Recently, non-volatile memory (NVRAM) has attracted substantial attention as a next-generation storage device due to the fact that it shows higher read/write performance than flash-based storage as well as higher cost-effectiveness than DRAM. One way to use NVRAM as a storage device is to modify the existing file system layer or block device layer. Leveraging the NVRAM block device driver is advantageous in terms of overall system compatibility, as it does not require any modification of the existing storage stack. However, when considering the byte-level addressing of the NVRAM device, the block write is not effective in terms of durability or performance. In this paper, we propose a block device driver that attempts to optimize the existing block write operations while considering the existing functionalities of the file system. The proposed block write reduction scheme provides a partial block write by classifying the type of blocks according to the structure of the file system as well as the amount of data modified in the block using XOR operation. Several experiments are performed to validate the performance of the proposed block device driver under various workloads, and the results show that, compared to the conventional block write operations, the amount of writes is reduced by up to 90%.