Holistic and Opportunistic Scheduling of Background I/Os in Flash-Based SSDs

Background (BG) tasks are maintained indispensably in multiple layers of storage systems, from applications to flash-based SSDs. They launch a large amount of I/Os, causing significant interference with foreground (FG) I/O performance. Our key insight is that, to mitigate such interference, holistic scheduling of system-wide, multi-source BG I/Os is required and can only be realized at the underlying SSD layer. Only the SSD has a global view of all FG and BG I/Os as well as direct information and control about flash storage resources. We are thus inspired to propose a novel I/O scheduling architecture, called HuFu. It provides a framework for host software to register BG tasks and offload their I/O scheduling into the SSD. Then, the SSD-internal I/O scheduler prioritizes FG I/O processing, while BG I/Os are scheduled opportunistically by utilizing flash parallelism and idleness. To verify HuFu, we perform case studies on RocksDB and compares it with several state-of-the-art host-side I/O scheduling schemes. Experimental results show that HuFu can significantly alleviate performance interference caused by BG I/Os and improve SSD bandwidth utilization, thus improving the FG throughput, average and tail latencies (e.g., by about 18% in a write-heavy workload).