Assessment of the Efficiency of Garbage Collection for the MiNV File System
In-Hwan Doh, Jong-Moo Choi, Dong‐Hee Lee, Sam-H. Noh · 2008
Non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) has both characteristics of nonvolatility and byte addressability. In order to efficiently exploit this NVRAM in the file system layer, we proposed the MiNV (Metadata in NVram) file system in our previous research. MiNV file system maintains all the metadata in NVRAM while storing file data in NAND Flash memory. In this paper, we experimentally analyze the efficiency for the execution of garbage collection in the MiNV file system. Also, we quantify the file system performance gains obtained from efficient garbage collection. Experimental results show that garbage collection on the MiNV file system executes more efficiently that on YAFFS even though these file systems adopt exactly the same garbage collection policy. Specifically, the MiNV file system invokes the aggressive garbage collection mechanism less frequently than YAFFS. Additionally, the MiNV file system postpones the first execution of the aggressive garbage collection mechanism in our experiments. From the experiments, we verify that the efficiency of garbage collection leads to performance improvements of the MiNV file system.