Cooperating write buffer cache and virtual memory management for flash memory based systems

Flash memory is becoming the storage media of choice for mobile devices and embedded systems. The performance of flash memory is impacted by the asymmetric speed of read and write operations, limited number of erase times and the absence of in-place updates. To improve the performance of flash memory based systems, write buffer cache has been equipped in flash memories recently. At the same time, new virtual memory management strategies have been proposed in recent studies that consider the characteristics of flash memory. In this paper, we propose cooperative management schemes for virtual memory and write buffer cache to improve performance of flash memory based systems. Management on virtual memory is designed to exploit the write buffer cache status and management on write buffer cache is designed to cooperate with virtual memory to improve flash memory performance. The experimental results show that the proposed approaches can improve I/O performance by 34.8% on average, and reduce the number of erase and write operations by 44.7% and 28.6% on average. © 2011 IEEE.