next up previous
Next: Preallocation background Up: Features found in Linux Previous: Improving ext3 scalability


Reservation based block allocator

Since disk latency is the key factor that affects the filesystem performance, modern filesystems always attempt to layout files on a filesystem contiguously. This is to reduce disk head movement as much as possible. However, if the filesystem allocates blocks on demand, then when two files located in the same directory are being written simultaneously, the block allocations for the two files may end up getting interleaved. To address this problem, some filesystems use the technique of preallocation, by anticipating which files will likely need allocate blocks and allocating them in advance.



Subsections

Mingming Cao 2005-07-26