AN EXPLORATION FOR TEST METHODOLOGY OF ZONED BLOCK STORAGE DEVICE ON EMULATION PLATFORM AND COMPARISON WITH NON-ZONED DEVICE

Abstract

Recently, memory device technologies have evolved very fast, and the need for fast benchmarking and testing methods became critical. So, simulation and emulation methods have become very helpful in testing, benchmarking and consequently developing such storage devices. These emulation platforms can be purely software, purely hardware or a mix of both. In this project, a purely software emulation platform is used to test and benchmark zoned and non-zoned block memory devices that constitute the main storage component in Solid State Drives (SSDs). This project explores the use of Linux null block device driver to measure and compare the latency and performance of zoned and non-zoned block memory devices on both real and virtual machines.

By varying the size of Input Output (I/O) and the number of writing threads/jobs, different experiments were run on real machine as well as virtual machines with variable number of CPU cores. Input Output operations (I/Os) are the user data represented in host read/write commands and is used to count the number of completed I/O operations where a typical data size is 512B, 4KB, 8KB, etc. The Flexible Input output (FIO) tester and fio-plot were used for benchmarking. The results show that the performance and latency measurements are better on real machines than on the virtual ones and that there are variations based on number of cores used by the virtual machines.

Storage devices continue to evolve and so the ability to test, benchmark and assess these devices should evolve and adapt to new tools and methods. The use of FIO tools, benchfio and fio-plot is one way to simplify this task and support the fast evolution of these storage devices.