Micron Looks To Upstream Their Media Pool "Mpool" Object Storage To The Linux Kernel

Micron's Mpool is at the heart of their HSE Open-Source Storage Engine in providing an object storage media pool built atop block storage devices. Micron engineers are now looking at possibly having Mpool upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel.

The HSE Open-Source Storage Engine has continued advancing as an optimized key-value store database for high performance SSDs and persistent memory. HSE builds on top of the Mpool implementation that offers this object storage built atop the raw SSD / persistent memory devices without any underlying file-system.

Outside of the HSE context, Mpool could potentially be used by other object storage systems building on immutable objects. Micron engineers said they designed Mpool in order to better support NVMe Streams, ZNS, persistent memory, and other modern features.

A set of 22 patches amounting to over twenty-three thousand lines of new kernel code were sent out today for review in looking to have the Mpool kernel driver mainlined.

We'll see how the review process goes and if other upstream Linux storage/block developers are interested in the merits of Mpool and getting it upstreamed. More technical details on the Mpool implementation can be found via the cover letter of the patch series.