File-system-level flash caching for improving application launch time on logical hybrid disks

Abstract

Application launch time is an important performance metric to user experience in desktop environment. The launch time mostly depends on the performance of secondary storage. There is a cost-performance trade-off in using hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD). Thus, application launch times can be reduced by utilizing SSDs as caches for slow HDDs. We propose a new SSD caching scheme which migrates data blocks from HDDs to SSDs. Since our scheme operates entirely in the file system level and does not require an extra layer for mapping SSD-cached data, which is essential in most other schemes, our scheme does not incur mapping overheads that cause significant burdens on main memory, CPU, and SSD cache itself. Experimental results demonstrate our scheme yields 56% of performance gain in application launch.