Improving the Demand Paging Performance with NAND-type Flash Memory

Because of its superior read performance and other favorable features over standard NAND flash memory, OneNAND flash has become the most promising alternative for implementing high-performance mobile devices. However, the superior read performance of OneNAND flash can not be fully utilized under the I/O architecture of existing general purpose operating systems. This paper investigates the problem in the context of demand paging, and introduces a new scheme called virtual I/O segment for solving that problem. Experiments by implementation show that the read latency of OneNAND flash based block device can be reduced as much as 54% by the use of virtual I/O segments. Also, page fault handling time of real-world embedded applications is reduced as much as 42%.