28 May 2024 to 1 June 2024
University of Ottawa
EST timezone

Alamosa: A Tiered Disk Block Cache for NetBSD

31 May 2024, 14:45
1h
Desmarais 1130 (University of Ottawa)

Desmarais 1130

University of Ottawa

Lecture 50 min Development Talks: Room 1130 - Friday

Speaker

Kira Ash

Description

Alamosa is a simple but fast tiered disk cache layer for NetBSD that I have been developing since mid 2023. Loosely inspired by Linux's bcache, Alamosa is designed to provide moderate disk I/O performance gains using small, fast disks as a transparent and flexible block cache.

In this presentation, I will discuss the development and design of Alamosa, the challenges encountered, and performance on Alamosa's target workloads, especially read-heavy SQLite and LMDB. I will also discuss future plans, including support for multi-device cache groups and a new profile-based block eviction mechanism to replace the current least-recently-used structure, as well as the roadmap for submitting Alamosa to upstream NetBSD.

Primary author

Presentation materials