• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.636-645
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• 2008

OneNAND flash is a high-performance hybrid flash memory that combines the advantages of both NAND flash and NOR flash. OneNAND flash has not only all virtues of NAND flash but also greatly enhanced read performance which is considered as a downside of NAND flash. As a result, it is widely used in mobile applications such as mobile phones, digital cameras, PMP, and portable game players. However, most of the general purpose operating systems, such as Linux, can not exploit the read performance of OneNAND flash because of the restrictions imposed by their virtual memory system and block I/O architecture. In order to solve that problem, we suggest a new approach called virtual I/O segment. By using virtual I/O segment, the superior read performance of OneNAND flash can be exploited without modifying the existing block I/O architecture and MTD subsystem. Experiments by implementations show that this approach can reduce read latency of OneNAND flash as much as 54%.