Universal Flash Storage on FreeBSD

Saturday 15:45 - 16:35

Universal Flash Storage (UFS) is a high-performance, low-power storage interface that has increasingly replaced eMMC in smartphones, tablets, and automotive systems. However, FreeBSD has historically lacked a UFS driver. In this talk, I share the implementation experience of ufshci(4), a UFS host controller driver now included in FreeBSD 15.0. I introduce the layered UFS architecture, explain how the driver integrates with FreeBSD’s CAM storage stack, and walk through the driver initialization sequence. The talk provides a reproducible QEMU-based hands-on setup and shows fio results on real hardware that are comparable to Linux. Finally, I share the current status and roadmap for ongoing work on MCQ, power management, and ARM platform support.