Buffer Cache Management based on Nonvolatile Memory to Improve the Performance of Smartphone Storage

DRAM is commonly used as a smartphone memory medium, but extending its capacity is challenging due to DRAM`s large battery consumption and density limit. Meanwhile, smartphone applications such as social network services need increasingly large memory, resulting in long latency due to additional storage accesses. To alleviate this situation, we adopt emerging nonvolatile memory (NVRAM) as smartphone`s buffer cache and propose an efficient management scheme. The proposed scheme stores all dirty data in NVRAM, thereby reducing the number of storage accesses. Moreover, it separately exploits read and write histories of data accesses, leading to more efficient management of volatile and nonvolatile buffer caches, respectively. Trace-driven simulations show that the proposed scheme improves I/O performances significantly.