Improving I/O Performance via Address Remapping in NVMe Interface

Abstract

Recently, flash-based solid-state drives (SSDs) are widely used in industry and academia due to their higher bandwidth and lower latency compared with traditional hard disk drives (HDDs). Furthermore, SSDs with the Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) interface can provide higher performance and ultra-low latency compared with the Serial AT Attachment (SATA) SSDs. Due to their high performance, NVMe SSDs are adopted in many systems as fast storage devices. However, the performance of NVMe SSDs can be negatively affected by I/O access patterns. For example, random write access patterns can have negative impacts on performance due to the unique characteristics of SSDs such as out-of-place update and garbage collection. In this paper, we propose an address remapping scheme to improve the I/O performance of NVMe SSDs. Our proposed scheme transforms random access patterns into sequential access patterns in the NVMe device driver. This allows our scheme to improve the I/O performance of NVMe SSDs while supporting widely used file systems such as EXT4, XFS, BTRFS, and F2FS without any modification to the device. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme can improve the performance of NVMe SSD by up to 64.1% compared with the existing scheme.

Keywords

• Flash-based SSDs
• NVMe interface
• device driver
• I/O performance
• garbage collection