A New Linux Swap System for Flash Memory Storage Devices

Flash memory has become an alternative storage device for future computer systems. Legacy operating system functionalities like file system and memory system should be modified since flash memory cannot be overwritten unless erased in advance. In this paper, we study a new Linux swap system considering flash memory as a swap storage. Especially we focus on the garbage collection performance and reduce the number of erasures and the number of data copies due to garbage collection. We collected real traces of swap I/O activities of Linux kernel and show that proposed method shows much better performance by means of trace-driven simulation.