Open Source Summit + ELC North America 2019

One of the most common persistent memory technology in today's embedded Linux devices is eMMC flash memory.
The raw NAND flash used inside the eMMC chips has a limited number of write cycles. To get a long lifetime several tactics are employed such as wear level algorithms and error correction. From the low-level firmware on the eMMC controller across several layers of software, it is rather difficult for an application programmer to understand what particular wear his program imposes on the underlying flash.
We are discussing an implementation to monitor the flash usage on the block level which can be used to make more accurate lifetime estimations and provide feedback to an application program for storage-related optimizations.