• Journal of KIISE
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• v.43 no.4
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• pp.411-418
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• 2016

In recent times, NAND flash memory has become widely used as secondary storage for computing devices. Accordingly, to take advantage of NAND flash memory, new file systems have been actively studied and proposed. The performance of these file systems is generally measured with benchmark tools. However, since benchmark tools are executed by software simulation methods, many researchers get non-uniform benchmark results depending on the system environments. In this paper, we use Filebench, one of the most popular and representative benchmark tools, to analyze benchmark results and study the reasons why the benchmark result variations occur. Our experimental results show the differences in benchmark results depending on the system environments. In addition, this study substantiates the fact that system performance is affected mainly by background I/O requests and fsync operations.

• KIISE Transactions on Computing Practices
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.52-57
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• 2015

In this paper, we analyze the performance of the TRIM commands on various SSDs and, based on our analysis results, we enhance the performance of these TRIM commands in the Ext4 file system. We observed that the performance of the TRIM commands improves as the size of the LBA-range increases, the sector number is aligned and continuous or more LBA-ranges are notified via a single TRIM command. However, although the performance is better when multiple LBA-ranges are informed by a single TRIM command, the Ext4 file system issues a single TRIM command for every LBA-range. In this paper, we modify the Ext4 file system to convey at most 64 LBA-ranges per TRIM command. Evaluations through Filebench show that the performance of file deletion operations is improved by up to 35%.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.80-90
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• 2019

Even though Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) is used for data storage, a page table should be built to access data in it. And this observation leads us to the Persistent Page Table (PPT) scheme that keeps the page table in NVM persistently. By the way, processors have different page table structures and really operational page table cannot be built without virtual and physical addresses of NVM. However, those addresses are determined dynamically when NVM storage is attached to the system. Thus, the PPT should have system-independent and also address-independent structure and really working system-dependent page table should be built from the PPT. Moreover, entries of PPT should be updated atomically and, in this paper, we describe the design of PPT that meets those requirements. And we investigate how file systems can decrease the journaling overhead with the swap operation, which is a new operation created by the PPT. We modified the Ext4 file system in Linux and experiments conducted with Filebench workloads show that the swap operation enhances file system performance up to 60%.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.27-35
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• 2021

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.