CBM: A cooperative buffer management for SSD

Abstract

Random writes significantly limit the application of Solid State Drive (SSD) in the I/O intensive applications such as scientific computing, Web services, and database. While several buffer management algorithms are proposed to reduce random writes, their ability to deal with workloads mixed with sequential and random accesses is limited. In this paper, we propose a cooperative buffer management scheme referred to as CBM, which coordinates write buffer and read cache to fully exploit temporal and spatial localities among I/O intensive workload. To improve both buffer hit rate and destage sequentiality, CBM divides write buffer space into Page Region and Block Region. Randomly written data is put in the Page Region at page granularity, while sequentially written data is stored in the Block Region at block granularity. CBM leverages threshold-based migration to dynamically classify random write from sequential writes. When a block is evicted from write buffer, CBM merges the dirty pages in write buffer and the clean pages in read cache belonging to the evicted block to maximize the possibility of forming full block write. CBM has been extensively evaluated with simulation and real implementation on OpenSSD. Our testing results conclusively demonstrate that CBM can achieve up to 84% performance improvement and 85% garbage collection overhead reduction compared to existing buffer management schemes.