pblk: Host-based FTL for Open-Channel SSDs

The Physical Block Device (pblk) implements a sector-based fully associative, host-based FTL that exposes a traditional block I/O interface. Pblk’s main responsibilities are:

  • Map logical addresses onto physical addresses (4KB granularity) in the L2P table
  • Maintain data integrity and data consistency of the L2P table as well as its recovery under power-off and power outage
  • Manage controller- and media-specific constrains
  • Handle write and erase errors
  • Implement garbage collection (GC) routines to garbage collect blocks
  • Implement padding when flush is issued from file-systems in order to maintain data consistency

Pblk integrates with the LightNVM [1] subsystem. As such, pblk is initialized with a user-defined range of LUNs. A single device can be carved out and shared among different pblk instances. Each instance owns a portion of the device’s capacity and leverages a portion of the device’s throughput. Each instance manages different parallel units on the device and the assumption is that they do not interfere with each other when I/Os reach the device.

Here is what you need to take pblk for a spin:

The following sections will guide you through what you need, if you already have those in place then jump to the Usage section.

Contents:

Indices and tables