Fast Initialization and Memory Management Techniques for Log-Based Flash Memory File Systems

Abstract

Flash memory’s adoption in the mobile devices is increasing for various multimedia services such as audios, videos, and games. The traditional research issues such as out-place update, garbage collection, and wear-leveling are important, the fast initialization and response time issues of flash memory file system are becoming much more important than ever because flash memory capacity is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we propose a fast initialization technique and an efficient memory management technique for fast response time in log-based flash memory file systems. Our prototype is implemented based on a well-known log-based flash memory file system YAFFS2 and the performance tests were conducted by comparing our prototype with YAFFS2. The experimental results show that the proposed initialization technique reduced the initialization time of the log-based flash memory file system regardless of unmounting the file system properly. Moreover our prototype outperforms YAFFS2 in the read I/O operations and the forward/backward seek I/O operations by way of our proposed memory management technique. This technique is also able to be used to control the memory size required for address mapping in flash memory file systems.