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HotOS X, Tenth Workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems — Abstract
Aggressive Prefetching: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
Athanasios E. Papathanasiou and Michael L. Scott,
University of Rochester
Abstract
I/O prefetching serves to hide the latency of slow peripheral devices. Traditional OS-level prefetching strategies have tended to be conservative, fetching only those data that are very likely to be needed according to some simple heuristic, and only just in time for them to arrive before the first access. More aggressive policies, which might speculate more about which data to fetch, or fetch them earlier in time, have typically not been considered a prudent use of computational, memory, or bandwidth resources. We argue, however, that technological trends and emerging system design goals have dramatically reduced the potential costs and dramatically increased the potential benefits of highly aggressive prefetching policies. We propose that memory management be redesigned to embrace such policies.
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