R&D: ZNSwap, Un-Block your Swap

ACM Transactions on Storage has published an article written by Shai Bergman, Technion, Haifa, Israel, Niklas Cassel, Western Digital, Copenhagen V, Denmark, Matias Bjørling, and Mark Silberstein, Technion, Haifa, Israel.

Abstract: “We introduce ZNSwap, a novel swap subsystem optimized for the recent Zoned Namespace (ZNS) SSDs. ZNSwap leverages ZNS’s explicit control over data management on the drive and introduces a space-efficient host-side Garbage Collector (GC) for swap storage co-designed with the OS swap logic. ZNSwap enables cross-layer optimizations, such as direct access to the in-kernel swap usage statistics by the GC to enable fine-grain swap storage management, and correct accounting of the GC bandwidth usage in the OS resource isolation mechanisms to improve performance isolation in multi-tenant environments. We evaluate ZNSwap using standard Linux swap benchmarks and two production key-value stores. ZNSwap shows significant performance benefits over the Linux swap on traditional SSDs, such as stable throughput for different memory access patterns, and 10 × lower 99th percentile latency and 5 × higher throughput for memcached key-value store under realistic usage scenarios.“