R&D: Optimizing Garbage Collection Overhead of Host-level Flash Translation Layer for Journaling Filesystems

International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication has published an article written by Son, Sehee, and Ahn, Sungyong, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Pusan National University, Korea.

Abstract: “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.“