Open-Channel SSD Support Still Baking For The Linux Kernel

Matias Bjørling continues tackling support for "open-channel SSDs" within Linux. His fourth revision to his Open-Channel SSD patch-set has been published and re-based against code in development for the Linux 4.3 kernel.

Open-Channel SSDs refer to solid-state drives that expose the physical characteristics to the host. File-systems and applications are able to directly place and manage data on flash chips where they wish along with managing the garbage collection and other behavior. Tieing in with Open-Channel SSDs is the LightNVM specification for providing a common interface to the system for controlling the SSD characteristics.

Open-channel SSDs aren't intended for general PC consumers but rather data centers, software-defined SSDs, and other application-specific purposes. If you're learning about Open-Channel SSDs for the first time today, you can learn more about it via the PDF slides presented by Matias Bjørling back at the Linux Foundation Vault file-system/storage conference earlier in the year. Related code to Open-Channel and LightNVM can be found via this GitHub repository.

The v4 patches published today for Open-Channel SSD support within the Linux kernel can be found on the kernel mailing list. It isn't yet clear from this latest patch revision whether the code will be ready for merging into Linux 4.3.