Prototyping and performance evaluation of a dynamically adaptable block device driver for PCIe-based SSDs

Abstract

Solid-state drives use non-volatile memories for storing and retrieving information in the form of sectors and/or pages and demonstrate better performance than hard disks. In many cases, the maximum IO performance of the used memory technology is not achieved due to limitations imposed by the software device driver that interfaces the storage card with the hosts's operating system. Today's computing machines with conventional operating systems have been developed based on the performance characteristics of hard disk drives. In this work, we present the prototype of a new block device driver with a flexible host-device interface suitable for PCIe-based solid-state drives. The block device driver is compatible with the standard software dataflow of a Linux-based OS, and at the same time exploits the operational features of such devices to provide improved performance. Experimental results that demonstrate how the system performance is affected by decisions on the device driver's functionality are presented along with the used testing methodology.