research-article

Impact of NVRAM write cache for file system metadata on I/O performance in embedded systems

Authors:

Sam H. NohAuthors Info & Claims

SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing

Pages 1658 - 1663

https://doi.org/10.1145/1529282.1529654

Published: 08 March 2009 Publication History

Abstract

File systems make use of part of DRAM as the buffer cache to enhance its performance in traditional systems. In this paper, we consider the use of Non-Volatile RAM (NVRAM) as a write cache for metadata of the file system in embedded systems. NVRAM is a state-of-the-art memory that provides characteristics of both non-volatility and random byte addressability. By making NVRAM a write cache for dirty metadata, we retain the same integrity of a file system that always synchronously writes its metadata to storage, while at the same time improving file system performance to the level of a file system that always writes asynchronously. To show quantitative results, we develop an embedded board with NVRAM and modify the VFAT file system provided in Linux 2.6.21 to accommodate the NVRAM write cache. The experimental results show that substantial reductions in execution time are possible from an application viewpoint. Another consequence of the write cache is its benefits at the FTL layer, leading to improved wear leveling of Flash memory and increased energy savings, which are important measures in embedded systems.

References

[1]

Ramtron International, http://www.ramtron.com.

[2]

Freescale Semiconductor, http://www.freescale.com.

[3]

Technology Review, http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/20148.

[4]

BGET Memory Allocator, http://www.fourmilab.ch/bget.

[5]

M. Baker, S. Asami, E. Deprit, J. Ouseterhout, and M. Seltzer. Non-Volatile Memory for Fast, Reliable File Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS-V), pages 10--22, 1992.

Digital Library

[6]

P. M. Chen, W. T. Ng, S. Chandra, C. Aycock, G. Rajamani, and D. Lowell. The Rio File Cache: Surviving Operating System Crashes. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS-VII), pages 74--83, 1996.

Digital Library

[7]

I. H. Doh, J. Choi, D. Lee, and S. H. Noh. Exploiting Non-Volatile RAM to Enhance Flash File System Performance. In Proceedings of the 7th ACM & IEEE International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT'07), pages 164--173, 2007.

Digital Library

[8]

Y. Du, M. Cai, and J. Dong. Adaptive Energy-Aware Design of a Multi-Bank Flash-Memory Storage System. In Proceedings of the 11th IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA'05), pages 311--316, 2005.

Digital Library

[9]

B. S. Gill and D. S. Modha. WOW:Wise Ordering for Writes. Combining Spatial and Temporal Locality in Non-Volatile Caches. In Proceedings of the 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'05), pages 129--142, 2005.

Digital Library

[10]

J. Katcher. PostMark: a New Filesystem Benchmark. Technical Report TR3022, Network Appliance, 1997.

[11]

H. Kim and S. Ahn. BPLRU: A Buffer Management Scheme for Improving Random Writes in Flash Storage. In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (FAST'08), pages 239--252, 2008.

Digital Library

[12]

J. Kim, J. M. Kim, S. H. Noh, S. L. Min, and Y. Cho. A Space-Efficient Flash Translation layer for CompactFlash Systems. IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronic, 48(2):366--375, 2002.

Digital Library

[13]

K. H. Lee, I. H. Doh, J. Choi, D. Lee, and S. H. Noh. Write-Aware Buffer Cache Management Scheme for Nonvolatile RAM. In Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on IASTED International Conference (ACST'07), pages 29--35, 2007.

Digital Library

[14]

E. L. Miller, S. A. Brandt, and D. D. E. Long. HeRMES: High-Performance Reliable MRAM-Enabled Storage. In Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HOTOS-VIII), pages 95--99, 2001.

Digital Library

[15]

A.-I. A. Wang, G. Kuenning, P. Reiher, and G. Popek. The Conquest File System: Better Performance Through a Disk/Persistent-RAM Hybrid Design. ACM Transactions on Storage, 2(3):309--348, 2006.

Digital Library

Cited By

Puglia GZorzo ADe Rose CPerez TMilojicic D(2019)Non-Volatile Memory File Systems: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.28994637(25836-25871)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2899463
Jang HRhee SKim JKim YHan HKang SJung H(2019)AutoBahn: a concurrency control framework for non-volatile file bufferCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-019-02964-8Online publication date: 29-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-019-02964-8
Jang HRhee SKim JKang SHan HJung H(2017)AUTOBAHN: Accelerating Concurrent, Durable File I/O via a Non-volatile Buffer2017 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER)10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.46(228-232)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.46
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Impact of NVRAM write cache for file system metadata on I/O performance in embedded systems
1. Computer systems organization
  1. Embedded and cyber-physical systems
  2. Real-time systems
2. Information systems
  1. Data management systems
    1. Data structures
      1. Data access methods
  2. Information storage systems
    1. Record storage systems
      1. Directory structures

Recommendations

Exploiting non-volatile RAM to enhance flash file system performance
EMSOFT '07: Proceedings of the 7th ACM & IEEE international conference on Embedded software

Non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) such as PRAM (Phase-change RAM), FeRAM (Ferroelectric RAM), and MRAM (Magnetoresistive RAM) has characteristics of both non-volatile storage and random access memory (RAM). These forms of NVRAM are currently being developed by ...
A PRAM and NAND flash hybrid architecture for high-performance embedded storage subsystems
EMSOFT '08: Proceedings of the 8th ACM international conference on Embedded software

NAND flash-based storage is widely used in embedded systems due to its numerous benefits: low cost, high density, small form factor and so on. However, NAND flash-based storage is still suffering from serious performance degradation for random or small ...
Migration-based hybrid cache design for file systems over flash storage devices

This work is motivated by the urgent need to enhance the reliability of file systems in battery-powered mobile computing systems and consumer electronics that utilize flash storage devices for data storage. In this paper, we use non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

SAC '09: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM symposium on Applied Computing

March 2009

2347 pages

ISBN:9781605581668

DOI:10.1145/1529282

Conference Chairs:
Sung Y. Shin
South Dakota State University, United States
,
Sascha Ossowski
University Rey Juan Carlos, Spain

Copyright © 2009 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGAPP: ACM Special Interest Group on Applied Computing

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 08 March 2009

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article

Funding Sources

Korea government

Conference

SAC09

Sponsor:

SIGAPP

SAC09: The 2009 ACM Symposium on Applied Computing

March 8, 2009 - March 12, 2008

Hawaii, Honolulu

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,650 of 6,669 submissions, 25%

Upcoming Conference

SAC '25

Sponsor:
sigapp

The 40th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing

March 31 - April 4, 2025

Catania , Italy

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

15
Total Citations
View Citations
602
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)2
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 04 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Puglia GZorzo ADe Rose CPerez TMilojicic D(2019)Non-Volatile Memory File Systems: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2019.28994637(25836-25871)Online publication date: 2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2899463
Jang HRhee SKim JKim YHan HKang SJung H(2019)AutoBahn: a concurrency control framework for non-volatile file bufferCluster Computing10.1007/s10586-019-02964-8Online publication date: 29-Jul-2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-019-02964-8
Jang HRhee SKim JKang SHan HJung H(2017)AUTOBAHN: Accelerating Concurrent, Durable File I/O via a Non-volatile Buffer2017 IEEE International Conference on Cluster Computing (CLUSTER)10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.46(228-232)Online publication date: Sep-2017
https://doi.org/10.1109/CLUSTER.2017.46
Olivier PBoukhobza JSenn EOuarnoughi H(2016)A Methodology for Estimating Performance and Power Consumption of Embedded Flash File SystemsACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems10.1145/290313915:4(1-25)Online publication date: 2-Aug-2016
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2903139
Ling Zhan Xieyun Fang Daping Li (2016)The research and implementation of metadata cache backup technology based on CEPH file system2016 IEEE International Conference on Cloud Computing and Big Data Analysis (ICCCBDA)10.1109/ICCCBDA.2016.7529537(72-77)Online publication date: Jul-2016
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICCCBDA.2016.7529537
Kim SKim HKim SLee JJeong JLu SRiedel E(2015)Request-oriented durable write caching for application performanceProceedings of the 2015 USENIX Conference on Usenix Annual Technical Conference10.5555/2813767.2813782(193-206)Online publication date: 8-Jul-2015
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2813767.2813782
Im SShin D(2014)Differentiated space allocation for wear leveling on phase-change memory-based storage deviceIEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics10.1109/TCE.2014.678092460:1(45-51)Online publication date: Feb-2014
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCE.2014.6780924
Huang PChang YTsao CYang MHsieh C(2013)Migration-based hybrid cache design for file systems over flash storage devicesACM SIGAPP Applied Computing Review10.1145/2577554.257755613:4(8-16)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2577554.2577556
Chang YHsieh CHuang PHsiu P(2012)A caching-oriented management design for the performance enhancement of solid-state drivesACM Transactions on Storage10.1145/2093139.20931428:1(1-21)Online publication date: 24-Feb-2012
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2093139.2093142
Park JLee EBahn H(2012)DABC-NV: A buffer cache architecture for mobile systems with heterogeneous flash memoriesIEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics10.1109/TCE.2012.641499158:4(1237-1245)Online publication date: Nov-2012
https://doi.org/10.1109/TCE.2012.6414991
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten