[clug] Flash VM: anyone seen/heard of this?

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

On Sun, Jan 8, 2012 at 4:40 PM, steve jenkin <sjenkin at canb.auug.org.au> wrote:
> Came across this piece of work and thought it may be of interest:
> <http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~msaxena/FlashVM.html>
>
> "Overall, the FlashVM system provides up to 94% reduction in application
> execution time and is four times more responsive than swapping to disk.
>  Furthermore, it improves reliability by writing up to 93% fewer pages
> than Linux, and provides a garbage collection mechanism *that is up to
> 10 times faster* than Linux with discard support."
>
> "FlashVM modifies the paging system along code paths for allocating,
> reading and writing back pages to optimize for the performance
> characteristics of flash.
>  It also reduces the number of page writes using zero-page sharing and
> page sampling that prioritize the eviction of clean pages."

See also http://www.fusionio.com/ which provides the PCI-e hardware to
do this kind of stuff... which if I understand correctly is about
having a "third tier" of memory so databases etc. can be completely in
fast access memory without actually being in RAM which doesn't come
(cheaply) in the TB+ size that their SSD-esque flash memory does.
They were in the news this week claiming to have achieved one billion
input and output operations per second, helped by the endorsement of
Steve Wozniak "Fusion-io Chief Scientist"
http://www.fusionio.com/press-releases/fusion-io-breaks-one-billion-iops-barrier/