Study on Garbage Collection Schemes for Flash-Based Linux Swap System

摘要

NAND flash memory based SSDs (solid state disks) have become an alternative storage device for future computer systems. Legacy operating system functionalities like file system and virtual memory system should be carefully re-designed since flash memory cannot be overwritten unless erased in advance. In this paper, we study the performance of garbage collection schemes when flash memory is used as the Linux swap storage. We have collected swap I/O traces from Linux kernel and performed trace-driven simulation. We found that Linux swap system must be re-designed in order to use flash memory as swap storage.