Barrier Enabled IO Stack for Flash Storage

Abstract

This work is dedicated to eliminating the overhead of guaranteeing the storage order in modern IO stack. The existing block device adopts prohibitively expensive resort in ensuring the storage order among write requests: interleaving successive write requests with transfer and flush. Exploiting the cache barrier command for the Flash storage, we overhaul the IO scheduler, the dispatch module and the filesystem so that these layers are orchestrated to preserve the ordering condition imposed by the application till they reach the storage surface. Key ingredients of Barrier Enabled IO stack are Epoch based IO scheduling, Order Preserving Dispatch, and Dual Mode Journaling. Barrier enabled IO stack successfully eliminates the root cause of excessive overhead in enforcing the storage order. Dual Mode Journaling in Barri-erFS dedicates the separate threads to effectively decouple the control plane and data plane of the journal commit. We implement Barrier Enabled IO Stack in server as well as in mobile platform. SQLite performance increases by 270% and 75%, in server and in smartphone, respectively. Relaxing the durability of a transaction, SQLite performance and MySQL performance increases as much as by 73× and by 43×, respectively, in server storage.