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Light-GC: a lightweight and efficient garbage collection scheme for embedded file systems

Published: 08 November 2022 Publication History

Abstract

Raw flash file systems are essential in today's cost-sensitive embedded systems and legacy embedded devices. The performance of raw flash file systems is often limited by their inefficient garbage collection (GC) due to the tight capacity of the onboard flash memory and CPU computing power. However, in real-world scenarios, we observed that the GC overhead can account for more than 85% of the total I/O time, which not only degrades the performance of the file system but also shortens the endurance of the flash chip. However, existing GC optimization used in high-end SSD or server-side file systems usually leads to high CPU and memory usage, which is not suitable for the embedded environment. In this paper, we propose LightGC, a low-complexity and high-efficiency GC scheme. We design an optimized clustering algorithm for page hotness measurement and a hot-delay GC victim selection strategy. LightGC can also be adapted to locality changes in workloads to maximize the effect of cold and heat separation. Our experimental results show that LightGC offers a relative improvement of up to 19% in GC efficiency, a 5%-15% reduction in write amplification, and a 10%-17% increase in flash memory endurance compared to other existing GC methods. In addition, driven by LightGC, we implement the UBIFS2 file system, an upgraded version of the UBIFS flash file system. We have done careful engineering design so that UBIFS2 and the original UBIFS are compatible with each other and users can switch between them freely.

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  • (2024)An Adaptive Real-Time Garbage Collection Method Based on File Write PredictionTheoretical Aspects of Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-64626-3_13(224-241)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2024

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        cover image ACM Conferences
        Middleware '22: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference
        November 2022
        110 pages
        ISBN:9781450393409
        DOI:10.1145/3528535
        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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        Published: 08 November 2022

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        Author Tags

        1. embedded filesystem
        2. garbage collection

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        Middleware '22: 23rd International Middleware Conference
        November 7 - 11, 2022
        QC, Quebec, Canada

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        Middleware '22 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 21 submissions, 38%;
        Overall Acceptance Rate 203 of 948 submissions, 21%

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        • (2024)An Adaptive Real-Time Garbage Collection Method Based on File Write PredictionTheoretical Aspects of Software Engineering10.1007/978-3-031-64626-3_13(224-241)Online publication date: 14-Jul-2024

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