INFLAWARE: Integrated Flash Memory Software Architecture for Interoperability, Reconfigurability, and Performance Enhancement

作者：Chung Yoojin; Baek Seungjae; Choi Jongmoo^*

来源：Information-An International Interdisciplinary Journal, 2010, 13(2): 409-426.

• Flash memory
• FAT File system
• FTL
• Interoperability
• Reconfigurability
• Performance Enhancement

Since Flash memory has been widely used in a variety of computer systems such as digital cameras, cellular phones, telematics, laptops and DB servers as a form of SSDs, interoperability become an indispensable requirement for Flash memory software architecture. For the purpose, many systems make use of the conventional FAT file system and FTL (Flash Translation Layer) software as a de facto standard, the former for supporting the file abstractions while the latter for overcoming the erase-before-write characteristics of Flash memory. However, the outdated design of the FAT file system and the deficiency of the collaborations between the FAT file system and FTL cause some drawbacks such as poor performance and less reliability.
In this paper, a novel integrated Flash memory software architecture, named INFLAWARE (INtegrated FLAsh memory softWARE), is proposed that supports not only interoperabilify but also performance enhancement and reconfigurability. To achieve interoperability, INFLAWARE provides the FAT compatible interfaces and internal structures such as FAT table and directories which make it possible for INFLAWARE to access Flash memory formatted by the existing FAT file system. For performance enhancement, INFLAWARE integrates the file system and FTL functionalities seamlessly and applies some collaborating performance improvement techniques such as map destroy technique. Finally, for reconfigurability, INFLAWARE is designed as a set of reconfigurable components and provides a reconfiguration tool so that users can choose functionalities only needed by their systems, enabling to reduce the usage of system resources. Real implementation based experimental results have shown that INFLAWARE can achieve improvements of memory footprint up to 27% with an average of 19% and response time up to 22% with an average of 10%, compared with the combination of the conventional FAT file system and FTL.

• 出版日期2010-3