Middleware - Firmware cooperation for high-speed solid state drives

Abstract

State-of-the-art solid state drives (SSDs) equip multiple internal resources such as NAND flash chips, data buses, and cores to take advantage of internal parallelism and provide fast I/O services. In addition, SSDs employ flash firmware to manage the internal resources and NAND flash characteristics. As a result, the performance of SSDs can be influenced by various underlying complexities in the firmware including garbage collection and page allocations. Unfortunately, since flash firmware is oblivious of the host-level system information and limited to manage their internal resources relying solely on incoming I/O requests, SSDs can be plagued by enormous performance variations across different I/O requests. In this poster, we propose MiFi, a Middleware and Firmware co-operative approach, which primarily targets overcoming the device-level management limitations by being aware of the host-level information as well as the underlying SSD complexities. © 2012 Authors.