An open-channel solid state drive is a solid-state drive which does not have a firmware Flash Translation Layer implemented on the device, but instead leaves the management of the physical solid-state storage to the computer's operating system.[1][2] The Linux 4.4 kernel is an example of an operating system kernel that supports open-channel SSDs which follow the NVM Express specification. The interface used by the operating system to access open-channel solid state drives is called LightNVM.[3][4][5]