Multi-Grained Block Management to Enhance the Space Utilization of File Systems on PCM Storages

Phase-change memory (PCM) is a promising candidate as a storage medium to resolve the performance gap between main memory and storage in battery-powered mobile computing systems. However, it is more expensive than flash memory, and thus introduces a more serious storage capacity issue for low-cost s...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on computers 2016-06, Vol.65 (6), p.1831-1845
Main Authors: Chen, Tseng-Yi, Chang, Yuan-Hao, Yang, Ming-Chang, Chen, Yun-Jhu, Wei, Hsin-Wen, Shih, Wei-Kuan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Ash
Blocking
byte-addressability
Dynamic scheduling
Dynamical systems
Dynamics
Effectiveness
File systems
Management
Materials handling
Mobile computing
Operating systems
Phase change materials
Phase-change memory
Resource management
space utilization
Storage capacity
Strategy
Utilization
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Summary:Phase-change memory (PCM) is a promising candidate as a storage medium to resolve the performance gap between main memory and storage in battery-powered mobile computing systems. However, it is more expensive than flash memory, and thus introduces a more serious storage capacity issue for low-cost solutions. This issue is further exacerbated by the fact that existing file systems are usually designed to trade space utilization for performance over block-oriented storage devices. In this work, we propose a multi-grained block management strategy to improve the space utilization of file systems over PCM-based storage systems. By utilizing the byte-addressability and fast read/write feature of PCM, a methodology is proposed to dynamically allocate multiple sizes of blocks to fit the size of each file, so as to resolve the space fragmentation issue with minimized space and management overheads. The space utilization of file systems is analyzed with consideration of block sizes. A series of experiments was conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed strategy, and the results show that the proposed strategy can significantly improve the space utilization of file systems.
ISSN:0018-9340
1557-9956
DOI:10.1109/TC.2015.2455972