Caching and prefetching algorithms for programs with looping reference patterns

Dini, Gianluca; Lettieri, Giuseppe; Lopriore, Lanfranco

doi:10.1093/comjnl/bxh140

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…It is a common practice to share prefetching memory with cache memory, this opens the door to interactions between prefetching and caching. Besides the basic defensive support for readahead thrashing discussed in this chapter, there are also comprehensive works dealing with integrated prefetching and caching (Butt, Gniady, and Hu, 2005;Cao, Felten, Karlin, and Li, 1995;Cao, Felten, Karlin, and Li, 1996;Dini, Lettieri, and Lopriore, 2006;Gill and Modha, 2005;Patterson, Gibson, Ginting, Stodolsky, and Zelenka, 1995;Itshak and Wiseman, 2008) and schemes to dynamically adapt the prefetching memory (Li and Shen, 2005) or prefetch depth (Gill and Bathen, 2007;Li, Shen, and Papathanasiou, 2007;Liang, Jiang, and Zhang, 2007).…”

Section: Basic Approaches To Prefetchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential File Prefetching in Linux

Wu¹

2010

Advanced Operating Systems and Kernel Applications

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Sequential prefetching is a well established technique for improving I/O performance. As Linux runs an increasing variety of workloads, its in-kernel prefetching algorithm has been challenged by many unexpected and subtle problems; As computer hardware evolves, the design goals should also be adapted. To meet the new challenges and demands, a prefetching algorithm that is aggressive yet safe, flexible yet simple, scalable yet efficient is desired. In this chapter, the author explores the principles of I/O prefetching and present a demand readahead algorithm for Linux. He demonstrates how it handles common readahead issues by a host of case studies. Both static, logic and dynamic behaviors of the readahead algorithm are covered, so as to help readers building both theoretical and practical views of sequential prefetching.

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Section: Basic Approaches To Prefetchingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sequential File Prefetching in Linux

Wu¹

2010

Advanced Operating Systems and Kernel Applications

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“…Our readahead framework has basic defensive support for readahead thrashing. There are more comprehensive works dealing with integrated prefetching and caching [3,4,5,6,12,21] and schemes to dynamically adapt the prefetch memory [14] or depth [11,15,17,24].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

On the design of a new Linux readahead framework

2008

SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev.

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As Linux runs an increasing variety of workloads, its inkernel readahead algorithm has been challenged by many unexpected and subtle problems. To name a few: readahead thrashings arise when readahead pages are evicted prematurely under memory pressure; readahead attempts on already cached pages are undesirable; interrupted-then-retried reads and locally disordered NFS reads that can easily fool the sequential detection logic. In this paper, we present a new Linux readahead framework with flexible and robust heuristics that can cover varied sequential I/O patterns. It also enjoys great simplicity by handling most abnormal cases in an implicit way. We demonstrate its advantages by a host of case studies. Network throughput is 3 times better in the case of thrashing and 1.8 times better for large NFS files. On serving large files with lighttpd, the disk utilization is decreased by 26% while providing 17% more network throughput.

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File Prefetching Algorithm for Concurrent Streams

Wu¹,

Xi²,

Xu³

2010

Journal of Software

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This paper proposes and implements a demand prefetching algorithm, which uses relaxed sequentiality criteria as well as page and page cache states as reliable sources of information. It can discover and prefetch sequential streams mixed in random accesses. It can also support the interleaved access patterns created by concurrent sequential reads on one file descriptor. Experimental results show that it performs much better than legacy Linux readahead: sequential reading intermixed with random ones are faster by 29%; I/O throughput of interleaved streams could be 4~27 times better, with application visible I/O latencies improved by up to 35 times. This demand prefetching algorithm has been adopted by Linux kernel 2.6.24.

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Caching and prefetching algorithms for programs with looping reference patterns

Cited by 3 publications

References 29 publications

Sequential File Prefetching in Linux

Sequential File Prefetching in Linux

On the design of a new Linux readahead framework

File Prefetching Algorithm for Concurrent Streams

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