Check out the new USENIX Web site.

Home About USENIX Events Membership Publications Students
FAST '03 Paper    [FAST '03 Tech Program Index]

Pp. 145-158 of the Proceedings
next
Next: Introduction

Design and Implementation of Semi-preemptible IO

Zoran Dimitrijevic        Raju Rangaswami         Edward Chang
University of California, Santa Barbara
zoran@cs.ucsb.edu        raju@cs.ucsb.edu         echang@ece.ucsb.edu

Abstract:

Allowing higher-priority requests to preempt ongoing disk IOs is of particular benefit to delay-sensitive multimedia and real-time systems. In this paper we propose Semi-preemptible IO, which divides an IO request into small temporal units of disk commands to enable preemptible disk access. We present main design strategies to allow preemption of each component of a disk access--seek, rotation, and data transfer. We analyze the performance and describe implementation challenges. Our evaluation shows that Semi-preemptible IO can substantially reduce IO waiting time with little loss in disk throughput. For example, expected waiting time for disk IOs in a video streaming system is reduced $ 2.1$ times with the throughput loss of less than $ 6$ percent.





Zoran Dimitrijevic 2003-01-06

This paper was originally published in the Proceedings of the 2nd USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies, March 31-April 2, 2003, San Francisco, CA, USA
Last changed: 20 March 2003 aw
Technical Program
FAST '03 Home
USENIX home