Bridging Mismatched Granularity Between Embedded File Systems and Flash Memory.

The mismatch between logical and physical I/O granularity inhibits the deployment of embedded file systems. Most existing embedded file systems manage logical space with a small unit, which is no longer the case of the flash operation granularity. Manually enlarging the logical I/O granularity of file systems requires enormous transplanting efforts. Moreover, large logical pages signify the write amplification problem, which turns to severe space consumption and performance collapse. This article designs a novel storage middleware, NV-middle, for legacy-embedded file systems with large-capacity flash memories. Legacy-embedded storage schemes can be smoothly transplanted into new platforms with different hardware read/write granularity. Moreover, the legacy optimization schemes can be maximally reserved, without inducing write amplification problems. We implement NV-middle with the state-of-the-art embedded file system, YAFFS2. Comprehensive evaluations show that NV-middle can achieve times of performance improvement over manually transplanted YAFFS2 with various workloads. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]