Summary: Removing The Costs Of Indirection
in Flash-based SSDs with Nameless Writes
Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau
, Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau
, and Vijayan Prabhakaran+
University of Wisconsin­Madison
and Microsoft Research+
Abstract
We present nameless writes, a new interface that obviates
the need for indirection in modern solid-state storage de-
vices (SSDs). Nameless writes allow the device to pick
the location of a write and only then inform the client
above of the decision. Doing so keeps control of block
allocation decisions in the device, thus enabling it to per-
form important tasks such as wear-leveling, while remov-
ing the need for large and costly indirection tables. We
discuss the proposed interface as well as the requisite de-
vice and file-system support.
1 Introduction
Indirection is a core technique in file and storage systems

Source: Arpaci-Dusseau, Remzi - Department of Computer Sciences, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Liblit, Ben - Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin at Madison

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences