A Case for Dynamic Sets in Operating Systems.
Abstract
Recent trends have exposed three key problems in today's operating systems. The first is the emergence of I/O latency as the dominant factor in the performance of many applications. The second is the need to cope with mobile communication environments where bandwidth and latency may be highly variable. The third is the importance of search activity to locating files of interest in a distributed system. In this paper we describe a single unifying abstraction called dynamic sets which can offer substantial benefits in the solution of these problems. These benefits include greater opportunity in the I/O subsystem to aggressively exploit prefetching and parallelism. as well as support for associative naming to complement the hierarchical naming in typical file systems. This paper motivates dynamic sets, presents the design of a system that embodies this abstraction, and evaluates a prototype implementation of the system via measurements and an analytical model.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Nov 30, 1994
- Accession Number
- ADA289354
Entities
People
- David Steere
- Mahadev Satyanarayanan
Organizations
- Carnegie Mellon University