An Adaptive Zone-Grouping Scheme Enabling General-Purpose File Systems on ZNS SSDs
Abstract
Zoned namespace solid state drives (ZNS SSDs) provide superior capacity and life span compared to conventional namespace (CNS) SSDs at the same cost. Especially, a small-zone ZNS SSD can achieve a low write amplification factor (WAF) and performance isolation among I/O streams by providing the host with finer-grained control of the SSD's flash chips than the large-zone counterpart. To maximize these advantages, multiple zones in a small-zone SSD should be grouped and operated simultaneously. A ZNS-aware file system encapsulates the ZNS interface and transforms a ZNS SSD into a general-purpose storage to the host layer. However, the current ZNS-aware file systems were designed for the largezone ZNS SSDs, and thus lack the zone group management feature. This paper proposes a dynamic zone group management scheme for ZNS-aware file systems that dynamically adjusts the number of zone groups in accordance with the workload characteristics and the size of each zone group to achieve high performance at a low WAF. The proposed scheme was implemented in the F2FS. Our evaluation with FIO, Filebench and db_bench showed that, across all cases, the proposed scheme improved the performance by up to 71.2% while reducing the WAF by 29.8% in comparison to the static zone grouping scheme.
