Uploaded June 2024 | Updated September 2026, 43 minutes ago
Alamosa is a simple but fast tiered disk cache layer for NetBSD that I have been developing since mid 2023. Loosely inspired by Linux's bcache, Alamosa is designed to provide moderate disk I/O performance gains using small, fast disks as a transparent and flexible block cache.
In this presentation, I will discuss the development and design of Alamosa, the challenges encountered, and performance on Alamosa's target workloads, especially read-heavy SQLite and LMDB. I will also discuss future plans, including support for multi-device cache groups and a new profile-based block eviction mechanism to replace the current least-recently-used structure, as well as the roadmap for submitting Alamosa to upstream NetBSD.
Alamosa is a simple but fast tiered disk cache layer for NetBSD that I have been developing since mid 2023. Loosely inspired by Linux's bcache, Alamosa is designed to provide moderate disk I/O performance gains using small, fast disks as a transparent and flexible block cache.
In this presentation, I will discuss the development and design of Alamosa, the challenges encountered, and performance on Alamosa's target workloads, especially read-heavy SQLite and LMDB. I will also discuss future plans, including support for multi-device cache groups and a new profile-based block eviction mechanism to replace the current least-recently-used structure, as well as the roadmap for submitting Alamosa to upstream NetBSD.
