Improving writeback performance of memory-based storage devices

Many I/O subsystems of general-purpose operating systems are optimized for the hard disk drive. The "writeback" feature is being used to overcome the mechanical limitation of the hard disk. But the current "writeback" mechanism is not optimal for memory-based storage devices which do not use mechanical instruments to read and write data. We have investigated the current "writeback" mechanism of Linux operating system and attempted to optimize it for memory-based storage devices. The current "writeback" handles bios one by one based on the mechanical limitation of the hard disk even though there may be many bios that could be handled simultaneously; the bios could be handled differently for memory-based storage devices. We have modified "writeback" so that multiple bios can be processed at a time, leading to improvements by more than 140% in write performance.

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