A Real-Time Garbage Collection Mechanism for Flash-Memory Stroage Systems in Embedded Systems
Li-Pin Chang, Tei‐Wei Kuo · 2002
Flash memory technology is becoming critical in building embedded systems applications because of its shock-resistant, power economic, and non-volatile nature. Because flash memory is a write-once and bulkerase medium, a translation layer and a garbage collection mechanism is needed to provide applications a transparent storage service. In this paper, we propose a real-time garbage collection mechanism, which provides a deterministic performance, for hard real-time systems. A wear-levelling method, which serves as a non-real-time service, is presented to resolve the endurance issue of flash memory. The capability of the proposed mechanism is demonstrated by a series of experiments over our system prototype.