Disk scheduling with quality of service guarantees

Abstract

The paper introduces YFQ, a new disk scheduling algorithm that allows applications to set aside for exclusive use portions of the disk bandwidth. We implemented YFQ as part of the Eclipse/BSD operating system, which is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4 BSD Unix. YFQ's disk bandwidth reservations can guarantee file accesses with high throughput, low delay, and good fairness. Such quality of service (QoS) guarantees to individual applications unfortunately can also hinder global disk scheduling optimizations. We propose and evaluate several disk scheduling enhancements that promote global optimizations and give to YFQ aggregate disk throughput approaching that of FreeBSD's conventional disk scheduler, which does not provide QoS guarantees. We believe that our enhancements may be helpful also in other disk scheduling algorithms.