uDMA: An Efficient User-Level DMA for NVMe SSDs

Abstract

The Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSD provides high I/O performance for current computer systems, and direct memory access (DMA) is the critical enabling mechanism for direct I/O. However, the lengthy I/O stack becomes a new bottleneck that degrades the potential of NVMe SSD. This paper reveals that existing user-level DMA introduces additional overhead for pinning memory used by DMA from the user space. Moreover, it cannot adapt to I/O requests of different data sizes. This paper proposes an efficient and dynamically adaptive user-level DMA (uDMA) mechanism that can adapt to I/O requests for different data sizes and lighten the I/O software stack by amortizing per-request latency. The critical component of uDMA is the pinned memory pool, which avoids frequently pinning new memory blocks by reusing allocated and pinned memory blocks. In addition, it effectively connects the discrete pinned memory blocks by the scatter/gather lists, improving the utilization of the pinned memory pool. Compared with the latest user-level DMA method, uDMA has an improvement of at least 17% under various data sizes.