METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR HIGH SPEED CACHE FLUSHING IN A NON-VOLATILE MEMORY

• Main Author: REID ROBERT ALAN
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 24.01.2013
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; COUNTING; ELECTRIC DIGITAL DATA PROCESSING; PHYSICS

An invention is provided for performing flush cache in a non-volatile memory. The invention includes maintaining a plurality of free memory blocks within a non-volatile memory. When a flush cache command is issued, a flush cache map is examined to obtain a memory address of a memory block in the plurality of free memory blocks within the non-volatile memory. The flush cache map includes a plurality of entries, each entry indicating a memory block of the plurality of free memory blocks. Then, a cache block is written to a memory block at the obtained memory address within the non-volatile memory. In this manner, when a flush cache command is received, the flush cache map allows cache blocks to be written to free memory blocks in the non-volatile memory without requiring a non-volatile memory search for free blocks or requiring erasing of memory blocks storing old data.