Unlike non-volatile memory that resides on the processor memory bus, memory-semantic solid-state drives (SSDs) support both byte and block access granularity via PCIe or CXL interconnects. They provide scalable memory capacity using NAND flash at a much lower cost. In addition, they have different performance characteristics for their dual byte/block interface respectively, while offering essential memory semantics for upper-level software. Such a byte-accessible storage device provides new implications on the software system design. In this paper, we develop a new file system, named ByteFS, by rethinking the design primitives of file systems and SSD firmware to exploit the advantages of both byte and block-granular data accesses. ByteFS supports byte-granular data persistence to retain the persistence nature of SSDs. It extends the core data structure of file systems by enabling dual byte/block-granular data accesses. To facilitate the support for byte-granular writes, ByteFS manages the internal DRAM of SSD firmware in a log-structured manner and enables data coalescing to reduce the unnecessary I/O traffic to flash chips. ByteFS also enables coordinated data caching between the host page cache and SSD cache for best utilizing the precious memory resource. We implement ByteFS on both a real programmable SSD and an emulated memory-semantic SSD for sensitivity study. Compared to state-of-the-art file systems for non-volatile memory and conventional SSDs, ByteFS outperforms them by up to 2.7×, while preserving the essential properties of a file system. ByteFS also reduces the write traffic to SSDs by up to 5.1× by alleviating unnecessary writes caused by both metadata and data updates in file systems.

@inproceedings{abs-2501-04993,
  title = {ByteFS: System Support for (CXL-based) Memory-Semantic Solid-State Drives},
  author = {Shaobo Li and Yirui (Eric) Zhou and Hao Ren and Jian Huang},
  booktitle = {ASPLOS},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1145/3669940.3707250}
}