OpenFlashFire: Write Reordering Layer/buffer

[Logic]

OpenFlashFire, previously known as FlashPoint and now probably as BPLRU, is a Write Reordering Layer/buffer for flash memory.
Its written by Hyojun Kim
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyojunkim
https://www.usenix.org/conference/fast- ... sh-storage

It made a huge difference to the 1st flash drives to hit the market, eliminating stutter completely.
There is also a USB flash drive version that makes flash writes extremely fast, if unremovable without a shutdown!
Its very beta and while YMMV, that's what I found.
Its currently doing great things for a seldom removed SD card I use for Readyboost in an EEEPC with a slow HDD, making it useable!
It's freeware. (GNU General Public License linked in the readme files)

This software may be useful or insightful to Romex (Hell I may even be talking to Hyojun!?)
Its virtually dissapeared off the net, so I'm linking to my Google drive folder wich contains all the various versions of the software, culminating in OpenFFire.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B1oCD ... FFtc2FQV1E
Feel free to check the files on VirusTotal etc.
https://www.virustotal.com/#/home/upload
The file names are self explainitory.
Let me know if there's an issue with the link.

Hope it's helpfull.

[idefix44]

Links OK, VirusTotal check OK.
Thanks.

[idefix44]

Can rxfcv.sys (PrimoCache driver) and offire.sys (OpenFlashFire driver) run both? (safely off course!)

[Logic]

Can rxfcv.sys (PrimoCache driver) and offire.sys (OpenFlashFire driver) run both? (safely off course!)

I havent tried yet as I'm having issues with AMD's RaidXpert not allowing read/write caching on my SSD. Hopefully my 60 days wont run out 1st.

Give it a try, but do create a restore point at the very least before playing with FlashFire. It never really came out of Beta, unless BPLRU is in use somewhere. I'm also unsure if its 32 or 64 bit?

Also NB that it basically doing what PrimoCache's defered write is doing.
It may or may not do a better job though.
My guess is it does a better job due to a better/more advanced caching algorithm, which is why I posted it here for Primocache to look at. Mod??

[Logic]

Links OK, VirusTotal check OK.
Thanks.

thx for the feedback.

[Logic]

Google Drive folder updated with new files I found:

The 'latest' version called FlashFire0a0.exe
2nd Latest version; FlashFire.v0.99.zip (or is it the other way around?)
Some other earlier, more beta versions.
A Chrome save of a defunct site discussion.
FlashPoint_description.txt

I have not re-checked these files on VirusTotal!

[Logic]

@ Primocache/Admin:

The following is from the FlashFire White Paper in the previously linked Google Drive Folder:

... first identify the inherent characteristics
of SSD technology
...we propose solutions that are designed to leverage these characteristics and overcome the inherent performance
problems of SSDs
...we propose a device driver-level solution called FlashFire that uses a Cluster Buffer and Smart Scheduling of read/write I/O requests from the OS.
The net effect of this solution is to aggregate the small random writes from the OS into large sequential writes, and then sending them to the physical storage.

We verified that FlashFire is able to provide better performance tuned to the intrinsic characteristics of SSD storages.
For instance, the slowest netbook took 74 minutes to install MS Office
...the time was reduced to 16 minutes with FlashFire.
...4.6 times better performance...

It allocates a small portion of the host memory ... as a cluster buffer.
...the OS write requests to the flash storage (which may not necessarily be sequential) are converted to big sequential writes in the cluster buffer by FlashFire. Further, Flash-Fire dynamically reorders and merges OS write requests,respecting the physical characteristics of the flash stor-age.

Ie:
This is an excellent, 'intelligent' caching software solution for flash based storage, despite the processor and FTL etc built into SSds and even SD cards.
It compliments your current deferred write cache (with its ability to update writes before they are written to Flash storage) and is worth looking at.

I believe this is worthy of some discussion!? After all it's not every day that someone appears on your forums with easily implementable freeware, likely to greatly improve the performance of Primocache.
Perhaps you have been struck speechless by the fact that a worthwhile, intelligent idea, worthy of discussion has actually appeared on this forum?
Or is it the possible legal aspects of acknowledging this thread that worry you?

Perhaps Eboostr or VeloSSD etc might be more receptive..?

[Support]

@Logic, thank you for the information!
PrimoCache defer-write also has such functions (identify/reorder/aggregate), and you may see #3 "Align and combine small writes to the SSD's block size" in our document below.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/prim ... -wear.html
And we are still improving performance and features for PrimoCache.
Thank you again.

[Logic]

@Logic, thank you for the information!
PrimoCache defer-write also has such functions (identify/reorder/aggregate), and you may see #3 "Align and combine small writes to the SSD's block size" in our document below.
http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/prim ... -wear.html
And we are still improving performance and features for PrimoCache.
Thank you again.

Ah! Thx 'Support'
So the delayed write is very similar.
As an engineer who got a MCSE for kicks (and then made the mistake of being a network admin for a while) I would like to see more technical info on the caching/algorithms used by Primocache.
Is such info available anywhere?

[Support]

Sorry for the late reply because we are on Lunar New Year Holiday.
Basically, PrimoCache uses a combination of LRU and LFU algorithm with self-tuning. Sorry, there's no more technical info about PrimoCache cache algorithms.