Dynamic interval polling and pipelined post I/O processing for low-latency storage class memory

Abstract

Emerging non-volatile memory technologies as a disk drive replacement raise some issues of software stack and interfaces, which have not been considered in disk-based storage systems. In this work, we present new cooperative schemes including software and hardware to address performance issues with deploying storage-class memory technologies as a storage device. First, we propose a new polling scheme called dynamic interval polling to avoid the unnecessary polls and reduce the burden on storage system bus. Second, we propose a pipelined execution between storage device and host OS called pipelined post I/O processing. By extending vendor-specific I/O interfaces between software and hardware, we can improve the responsiveness of I/O requests with no sacrifice of throughput.