Date of Original Version
12-2003
Type
Technical Report
Abstract or Table of Contents
Freeblock scheduling allows background applications to access the disk without affecting primary system activities. This paper describes a complete freeblock subsystem, implemented in FreeBSD. It details new space- and time-efficient algorithms that make freeblock scheduling useful in practice. It also describes algorithm extensions for using idle time, dealing with multi-zone disks, reducing fragmentation, and avoiding starvation of the inner- and outer-most tracks. The result is an infrastructure that efficiently provides steady disk access rates to background applications, across a range of foreground usage patterns.
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