Practical Enhancement of User Experience in NVMe SSDs

• Published in: Applied sciences 2020-07, Vol.10 (14)
• Main Authors: Kim, Seongmin, Kim, Kyusik, Shin, Heeyoung, Kim, Taeseok
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: End-user computing; Management; Parallel interface; Storage media; User statistics
• ISSN: 2076-3417; 2076-3417
• DOI: 10.3390/appl0144765

When processing I/O requests, the current Linux kernel does not adequately consider the urgency of user-centric tasks closely related to user experience. To solve this critical problem, we developed a practical method in this study to enhance user experience in a computing environment wherein non-volatile memory express (NVMe) solid-state drives (SSDs) serve as storage devices. In our proposed scheme, I/O requests that originate from the user-centric tasks were preferentially served across various levels of queues by modifying the multi-queue block I/O layer of the Linux kernel, considering the dispatch method of NVMe SSDs. Our scheme tries to give as fast a path as possible for I/O requests from user-centric tasks among many queues with different levels. Especially, when the SSD is overburdened, it avoids the queues with many pending I/O requests and thus can significantly reduce the I/O latency of user-centric tasks. We implemented our proposed scheme in the Linux kernel and performed practical evaluations on a commercial SSD. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme achieved significant enhancement in the launch time of five widely used applications by up to -65%. Keywords: NVMe SSD; user experience; multi-queue block I/O layer