[HN Gopher] SSDFS Is The Newest Linux Filesystem & Catering To N...
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       SSDFS Is The Newest Linux Filesystem & Catering To NVMe ZNS SSDs
        
       Author : mfiguiere
       Score  : 16 points
       Date   : 2023-02-25 18:44 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.phoronix.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.phoronix.com)
        
       | rektide wrote:
       | Very excited to see this forerunning adopter of NVMe Zoned
       | Namespaces (ZNS), the follow-up/merged effort to OpenChannel
       | Flash (and also useful for Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR))! We
       | don't use SSDs particularly well & this could be an epic leap
       | forward. I'm especially excited to see how cheaper DRAM-less
       | drives do, over time, leaving much more to the OS/system. ZNS is
       | a pretty simple idea - that it defines small-ish write-blocks
       | called Zones that are explicitly "opened" for writing (but not
       | rewriting) data, which then become "closed" as they fill or are
       | done. Additionally a new Append command let's data be added
       | sequentially, with the driver determining the final address
       | within the zone (typically the host defines the exact location
       | ahead of time when writing).
       | 
       | These capabilities are sufficient to enable a much better use of
       | the SSD than typical access patterns, which SSDFS here is working
       | to leverage.
       | 
       | It's can be hard to appreciate on the surface of it what these
       | small capabilities lead to, but it allows for a far more flash-
       | friendly access pattern, which SSDFS here is leveraging. Zoned
       | Storage[1] has a fairly technical intro page, and a number of
       | videos, which promise a lot. I'm extremely pleased with how
       | strong a foot forward Viacheslav makes as they describe how they
       | came at this problem from the other side, of building a FS to
       | leverage it: I think they did a great job conveying how this
       | capability works in practice & how much better it can be. This is
       | such a thrilling development!
       | 
       | [1] https://zonedstorage.io/docs/introduction/zns
        
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       (page generated 2023-02-25 23:02 UTC)