Rethinking the Request-to-IO Transformation Process of File Systems for Full Utilization of High-Bandwidth SSDs

This conference talk from FAST '25 presents research on rethinking file system design to fully utilize high-bandwidth SSDs. Learn how researchers from Huazhong University of Science and Technology and University of Texas at Arlington identified three key limitations in current SSD file systems: SSD-page alignment cost, page caching overhead, and insufficient IO concurrency. Discover their proposed solution, OrchFS (heterogeneous-IO orchestrated file system with alignment-based write-partition), which leverages small-size Non-Volatile Memory to maximize SSD performance by transforming file-writes into optimized SSD-page aligned and unaligned operations. The presentation covers novel techniques including heterogeneous-unit data layout, alignment-based file write partition, unified per-file mapping structure, and embedded parallel IO engine. Experimental results demonstrate OrchFS outperforming existing file systems by up to 29.76× for write and 6.79× for read operations across various storage configurations.