Enhanced configurable snapshot: snapshot-based fast booting on NAND flash with lifetime control.

Having a quick boot time has become a major issue in many consumer electronics to improve a user experience. Although instant on/off with persistent memory claims less than 1 second booting, the maturity of the technology is still in progress and the price has not reached a realistic level. Thus, snapshot-based booting with NAND flash is an attractive solution in the current consumer industry. Unfortunately, the snapshot-based booting technique yields extra writes to underlying storage devices such as NAND flash memory when saving the snapshot image. Naively adopting this technique on NAND flash memory, therefore, will bring reliability issues due to the limited lifetime of NAND flash memory. In this paper, we propose a new solution, Enhanced Configurable Snapshot (ECS), a snapshot-based fast booting technique on NAND flash memory, specially designed for improving its lifetime. Also, we present various techniques to improve the booting time. Experimental results show that ECS provides a 2.5x - 126.3x longer lifetime and 1.5x faster booting time on average than conventional snapshot-based booting on Linux kernel.