• Journal of KIISE:Computer Systems and Theory
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• v.36 no.3
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• pp.171-180
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• 2009

Slowly, but surely, we are seeing the emergence of a variety of embedded systems that are employing Storage Class RAM (SCRAM) such as FeRAM, MRAM and PRAM, SCRAM not only has DRAM-characteristic, that is, random byte-unit access capability, but also Disk-characteristic, that is, non-volatility. In this paper, we propose a new software architecture that allows SCRAM to be used both for main memory and for secondary storage simultaneously- The proposed software architecture has two core modules, one is a SCRAM driver and the other is a SCRAM manager. The SCRAM driver takes care of SCRAM directly and exports low level interfaces required for upper layer software modules including traditional file systems, buddy systems and our SCRAM manager. The SCRAM manager treats file objects and memory objects as a single object and deals with them in a unified way so that they can be interchanged without copy overheads. Experiments conducted on real embedded board with FeRAM have shown that the SCRAM driver indeed supports both the traditional F AT file system and buddy system seamlessly. The results also have revealed that the SCRAM manager makes effective use of both characteristics of SCRAM and performs an order of magnitude better than the traditional file system and buddy system.

• Journal of KIISE:Computing Practices and Letters
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.247-251
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• 2010

Using SCM in storage systems introduce new potentials for improving I/O performance and reliability. In this paper, we study the use of SCM as a buffer cache that guarantees transactional unit writes. Our proposed method can improve storage system reliability and performance at the same time and can recover the storage system immediately upon a system crash. The Proposed method is based on the LINUX JBD(Journaling Block Device), thus reliability is equivalent to JBD. In our experiments, the file system that adopts our method shows better I/O performance even while guaranteeing high reliability and shows fast file system recovery time (about 0.2 seconds).