Paper 7
The Implementation and Evaluation of a
Rotation-Latency-Sensitive Disk Scheduler
Lan Huang and Tzi-cker Chiueh
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Disk rotation latency is becoming an increasingly significant
component of disk service time, and yet has rarely been exposed to system software for scheduling purpose.
In this paper, we presented the design and implementation of a disk scheduler that can effectively
incorporate rotation latency into its scheduling decision. The two enabling mechanisms responsible for the successful
implementation of this disk scheduler are an accurate run-time disk head position prediction scheme,
and a precise disk service time model. We show that the accuracy of disk head position prediction and
disk service time prediction can approach close to 100% and more than 95%, respectively. We used both real and synthetic
traces to evaluate the performance of this rotation latency-sensitive disk scheduler (RSDS) and its variants,
and found that the performance improvement of RSDS over conventional disk schedulers that consider only seek delay is up to 48%.