Linux device mapper writecache

Kicking It Into Overdrive

dm-cache

The dm-cache component of the Linux kernel's device mapper has been around for quite some time – at least since 2006. It originally made its debut as a research project developed by Dr. Ming Zhao through his summer internship at IBM Research. The dm-cache module was integrated into the Linux kernel tree as of version 3.9. It is an all-purpose caching module and is written and designed to run all of the above caching methods, with the exception of write-around caching.

bcache

Very similar to dm-cache, bcache too is a Linux kernel driver, although it differs in a few ways. For instance, the user is able to attach more than one SSD as a cache and it is designed to reduce write amplification by turning random write operations into sequential writes.

Write amplification is an undesirable phenomenon wherein the amount of information physically written to the SSD is a multiple of the logical amount intended to be written. In the short term, the effects of write amplification are not felt immediately, but in the long term and as the medium begins to enforce its programmable erase (PE) cycles, making way for new write data, the life of each NAND cell is reduced.

dm-writecache

Fairly new to the Linux caching scene, dm-writecache was officially merged into the 4.18 Linux kernel. Unlike the other caching solutions mentioned already, the focus of dm-writecache is strictly writeback caching and nothing more: no read caching, no write-through caching. The thought process for not caching reads is that read data should already be in the page cache, which makes complete sense.

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