LightNVM Support Is Going Into Linux 4.4
The developer at Facebook wrote, "This first one adds support for lightnvm, and adds support to NVMe as well. This is pretty exciting, in that it enables new and interesting use cases for compatible flash devices."
Open-Channel SSDs implement the LightNVM specification for exposing more physical characteristics of the solid-state storage to the host operating system in order to make smarter choices. It's further explained as:
Open-channel SSDs are devices that share responsibilities with the host in order to implement and maintain features that typical SSDs keep strictly in firmware. These include (i) the Flash Translation Layer (FTL), (ii) bad block management, and (iii) hardware units such as the flash controller, the interface controller, and large amounts of flash chips. In this way, Open-channels SSDs can expose direct access to their physical flash storage, while keeping a subset of the internal features of SSDs.LightNVM has been a long-time work-in-progress, you can learn more about it from the original patch series and the support for open-channel SSDs.
LightNVM is a specification that gives support to Open-channel SSDs. LightNVM allows the host to manage data placement, garbage collection, and parallelism. Device specific responsibilities such as bad block management, FTL extensions to support atomic IOs, or metadata persistence are still handled by the device.
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