Locality and Duplication-Aware Garbage Collection for Flash Memory-Based Virtual Memory Systems

Abstract

As embedded systems adopt monolithic kernels, NAND flash memory is used for swap space of virtual memory systems. While flash memory has the advantages of low-power consumption, shock-resistance and non-volatility, it requires garbage collections due to its erase-before-write characteristic. The efficiency of garbage collection scheme largely affects the performance of flash memory. This paper proposes a novel garbage collection technique which exploits data redundancy between the main memory and flash memory in flash memory-based virtual memory systems. The proposed scheme takes the locality of data into consideration to minimize the garbage collection overhead. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed garbage collection scheme improves performance by 37% on average compared to previous schemes.