Dynamic disk bandwidth management and metadata pre-fetching in a real-time file system

Abstract

The authors focus on two practical considerations that arise in the design of a real-time file system. Firstly, disk bandwidth management should be dynamic, which in turn would allow a QoS manager to dynamically reallocate disk bandwidth to running applications based on their changing needs. Secondly, real-time access to file system data structures should be deterministic, in order to avoid unexpected latencies when accessing files from disk. These issues have implications to the design of the file system and to its schedulability analysis. They address both these problems and present an implementation in RTFS (Real-Time Filesystem Server), a real-time file system supporting disk bandwidth reservation running on top of the Real-Time Mach microkernel. Finally, quantitative comparisons of actual achieved file system bandwidth and response times are used to validate the approach.