|
FAST '04 — Abstract
Pp. 213-226 of the Proceedings
Awarded Best Student Paper!
A Framework for Building Unobtrusive Disk Maintenance Applications
Eno Thereska, Jiri Schindler, John Bucy, Brandon Salmon, Christopher R. Lumb, and Gregory R. Ganger, Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
This paper describes a programming framework for clean construction of disk maintenance applications. They can use it to expose the disk activity to be done, and then process completed requests as they are reported. The system ensures that these applications make steady forward progress without competing for disk access with a system's primary applications. It opportunistically completes maintenance requests by using disk idle time and freeblock scheduling. In this paper, three disk maintenance applications (backup, write-back cache destaging, and disk layout reorganization) are adapted to the system support and evaluated on a FreeBSD implementation. All are shown to successfully execute in busy systems with minimal (e.g., less than 2%) impact on foreground disk performance. In fact, by modifying FreeBSD's cache to write dirty blocks for free, the average read cache miss response time is decreased by 12-30%. For non-volatile caches, the reduction is almost 50%.
- View the full text of this paper in HTML and
PDF.
The Proceedings are published as a collective work, © 2004 by the USENIX Association. All Rights Reserved. Rights to individual papers remain with the author or the author's employer. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes. USENIX acknowledges all trademarks within this paper.
- If you need the latest Adobe Acrobat Reader, you can download it from Adobe's site.
|
Need help? Use our Contacts page.
