This paper proposes a novel scheduling technique at the layer of block I/O in the storage stack, to reduce the time required for completing I/O requests. Considering the fact of I/O requests issued by different applications may target at different ranges of data blocks on the disk (e.g. sectors in a hard disk drive), we present an adaptive splitting mechanism to preferably group relevant block requests, by referring their offsets (i.e. block numbers). Then, it performs the optimization task of merging consecutive block requests within each group, since only the block requests in the same group are most likely to be associated with a specific application. Finally, the well-scheduled block requests will be forwarded to the disk storage, to be eventually fulfilled. Through a series of experiments on several block traces of real-world multimedia applications, we show that compared to the existing block I/O scheduling approaches, the proposed scheme cuts down the I/O response time by more than 10.4%.
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