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USENIX 2002 Annual Conference - Technical Program Abstract
Exploiting Gray-Box Knowledge of Buffer-Cache Management
Nathan C. Burnett, John Bent, Andrea C. Arpaci-Dusseau, and
Remzi H. Arpaci-Dusseau,
Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Abstract
The buffer-cache replacement policy of the OS can have a
significant impact on the performance of I/O-intensive applications.
In this paper, we introduce a simple fingerprinting tool, Dust,
which uncovers the replacement policy of the OS. Specifically, we are
able to identify how initial access order, recency of access,
frequency of access, and long-term history are used to determine which
blocks are replaced from the buffer cache. We show that our
fingerprinting tool can identify popular replacement policies
described in the literature (e.g., FIFO, LRU, LFU, Clock, Random, Segmented
FIFO, 2Q, and LRU-K) as well as those found in current systems
(e.g., NetBSD, Linux, and Solaris).
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