A Zoned Storage Optimized Flash Cache on ZNS SSDs

Zoned Namespace SSDs (ZNS) are introduced recently to mitigate the block interface penalties of flash-based SSDs. It is a good opportunity for flash cache to address cache throughput and write amplification (WA) issues by fully controlling data allocation and garbage collection via zone-based interfaces. However, there are several critical challenges that need to be addressed including zone-interface compatibility, data management of large zone size, and a better tradeoff between throughput, cache hit ratio, and WA. In this paper, we present Z-CacheLib, a zoned storage optimized flash cache on ZNS SSDs. In Z-CacheLib, we propose: 1) a new zStorage Engine for ZNS SSDs with low mapping and operational overhead, and 2) a novel zCache Engine with cross-layer optimizations to resolve the throughput regression and WA issues of garbage collection, which consists of delayed data eviction with virtual over-provisioning (vOP), a top-down eviction policy (zLRU) optimized from LRU, and a bottom-up drop mechanism (zDrop) for low WA. Our evaluation shows that Z-CacheLib can achieve up to 2X throughput, 5% improvement hit ratio, and almost no WA compared to CacheLib with compatible regular SSDs, demonstrating benefits of using ZNS SSDs for cache. Moreover, Z-CacheLib can achieve up to 6X throughput and 92% WA reduction compared with F2FS-based scheme.