Future Non-volatile Memory Storage Architecture and File System Interface

Non-volatile memory (NVM) storage is becoming more popular as its performance and cost efficiency improve. Since the performance and characteristics of NVM storage are significantly different from those of HDDs, there are ongoing researches to utilize SSDs more efficiently and effectively. There is a claim that the further improvement of NVM storage performance makes it better to poll a storage device to sense completion of access requests rather than to use interrupts. Polling based storage can expand to become main memory based on NVM storage since there is no complex mechanism required to enable interrupts and access requests are processed one by one. This paper predicts that NVM storage will be in a form of main memory, and proposes constructing a file system directly on it in order to overcome its drawbacks when used simply as main memory. The performance projection of the proposed architecture is that accessing files on such a file system can reduce the overhead introduced by handling block devices.