Performance Impact of New Interface for Non-volatile Memory Storage

Abstract

Non-volatile memory (NVM) storage is becoming a main stream of storage devices for various segments from the high end to the low end markets. While its high performance fits the high end markets of enterprise storage, its lower power consumption fits the low end markets of mobile devices. As NVM storage becomes more popular, its form evolves from the one, which is compatible with HDDs, into those, which suit the market requirements more appropriately. Its interface, which connects NVM storage with systems, also evolves in order to improve the performance. There is a claim that the further improvement of NVM storage performance makes it better to poll a storage device to sense completion of access requests rather than to use interrupts. Polling based storage can have the same interface as memory since it processes access requests synchronously and such synchronous processing causes no interrupt that is necessary for asynchronous processing. This paper premises that NVM storage will be in a form of main memory, proposes constructing a file system directly on it, and investigates the performance impact of different NVM storage characteristics for the proposed architecture. The evaluation results show that the proposed architecture is advantageous with the performance that can be realistically achieved by future NVM storage.