UFS Host Performance Booster Driver Coming Together For Faster Performance

With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux.

UFS Host Performance Booster mode seeks to enhance the random read performance for Universal Flash Storage by using the system RAM as a cache for the Flash Translation Layer (FTL) mapping table. With the protocols of HPB for allowing the caching address mapping table to be in system RAM rather than NAND flash memory, random read performance can be 50~70% faster.

Micron has been leading the charge on developing UFS Host Performance Booster for Linux and last week published their latest patches. In Micron's testing of this work they found HPB helped random read performance by "up to about 46%".

The newest UFS Host Performance Booster patches for Linux can be found via the kernel mailing list. Hopefully this HPB driver will get squared away in time for Linux 5.8.