A Buffer Management Issue in Designing SSDs for LFSs

This letter introduces a buffer management issue in designing SSDs for log-structured file systems (LFSs). We implemented a novel trace-driven SSD simulator in SystemC language, and simulated several SSD architectures with the NILFS2 trace. From the results, we give two major considerations related to the buffer management as follows. (1) The write buffer is used as a buffer not a cache, since all write requests are sequential in NILFS2. (2) For better performance, the main architectural factor is the bus bandwidth, but 332MHz is enough. Instead, the read buffer makes a key role in performance improvement while caching data. To enhance SSDs, accordingly, it is an effective way to make efficient read buffer management policies, and one of the examples is tracking the valid data zone in NILFS2, which can increase the data hit ratio in read buffers significantly.