Real-time filesystems. Guaranteeing timing constraints for disk accesses in RT-Mach

Abstract

Traditional real-time systems have largely avoided the use of disks due to their relative slow speeds and their unpredictability. However, many real-time applications including multimedia systems and real-time database applications benefit significantly from the use of disks to store and access real-time data. We investigate the problem of obtaining guaranteed timely access to files on a disk in a real-time system. Our study focuses on several aspects of this problem of providing a real-time filesystem. First, we consider the use of two real-time disk scheduling algorithms: earliest deadline scheduling and just-in-time scheduling, a variation of aperiodic servers for the disk. The latter algorithm is designed to improve disk throughput that can be hurt when a real-time scheduling algorithm such as EDF is applied directly. Admission control policies with practically acceptable properties of performance and usability are provided. Next, we design and implement a real-time filesystem on the RT-Mach microkernel-based system running a real-time shell. The new interface we develop is based on RT-Mach's resource reservation paradigm and provides guaranteed and timely access for multiple concurrent applications requiring disk bandwidth with different timing and volume requirements. Finally, we perform a detailed performance evaluation of the real-time filesystem including its raw performance. We show the following positive but rather surprising result: our real-time scheduling filesystem not only provides guaranteed and timely access but also does so at relatively high levels of throughput. Traditional disk scheduling algorithms offer completely unacceptable file access latencies for real-time applications and do so only at slightly higher throughput.