Allocation Methods - Contiguous

 An allocation method refers to how disk blocks are allocated for files:
 Contiguous allocation – each file occupies set of contiguous blocks
 Best performance in most cases
 Simple – only starting location (block #) and length (number of blocks) are
required
 Problems include finding space for file, knowing file size, external fragmentation,
need for compaction off-line (downtime) or on-line

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.1 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Contiguous Allocation
 Mapping from logical to physical

LA/512

Block to be accessed = Q + starting address

Displacement into block = R

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.2 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Allocation Methods - Linked
 Linked allocation – each file a linked list of blocks
 File ends at nil pointer
 No external fragmentation
 Each block contains pointer to next block
 No compaction, external fragmentation
 Free space management system called when new block needed
 Improve efficiency by clustering blocks into groups but increases internal
fragmentation
 Reliability can be a problem
 Locating a block can take many I/Os and disk seeks

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.3 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Linked Allocation

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.4 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 File-Allocation Table

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.5 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Allocation Methods - Indexed
 Indexed allocation
 Each file has its own index block(s) of pointers to its data blocks

 Logical view

index table

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.6 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Example of Indexed Allocation

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.7 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Indexed Allocation (Cont.)
 Need index table

 Random access

 Dynamic access without external fragmentation, but have overhead of index block

 Mapping from logical to physical in a file of maximum size of 256K bytes and block size of
512 bytes. We need only 1 block for index table

Q
LA/512
R

Q = displacement into index table

R = displacement into block

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.8 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Free-Space Management
 File system maintains free-space list to track available blocks/clusters
 (Using term “block” for simplicity)
 Bit vector or bit map (n blocks)

0 1 2 n-1

1  block[i] free

bit[i] =
0  block[i] occupied

Block number calculation

(number of bits per word) *

(number of 0-value words) +
offset of first 1 bit

CPUs have instructions to return offset within word of first “1” bit

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.9 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Free-Space Management (Cont.)
 Bit map requires extra space
 Example:
block size = 4KB = 212 bytes
disk size = 240 bytes (1 terabyte)
n = 240/212 = 228 bits (or 32MB)
if clusters of 4 blocks -> 8MB of memory

 Easy to get contiguous files

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.10 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Linked Free Space List on Disk
 Linked list (free list)
 Cannot get contiguous space easily
 No waste of space
 No need to traverse the entire list (if
# free blocks recorded)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.11 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Free-Space Management (Cont.)
 Grouping
 Modify linked list to store address of next n-1 free blocks in first free block, plus a
pointer to next block that contains free-block-pointers (like this one)

 Counting
 Because space is frequently contiguously used and freed, with contiguous-allocation
allocation, extents, or clustering
 Keep address of first free block and count of following free blocks
 Free space list then has entries containing addresses and counts

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.12 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Efficiency and Performance
 Efficiency dependent on:
 Disk allocation and directory algorithms
 Types of data kept in file’s directory entry
 Pre-allocation or as-needed allocation of metadata structures
 Fixed-size or varying-size data structures

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.13 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Efficiency and Performance (Cont.)
 Performance
 Keeping data and metadata close together
 Buffer cache – separate section of main memory for frequently used blocks
 Synchronous writes sometimes requested by apps or needed by OS
 No buffering / caching – writes must hit disk before acknowledgement
 Asynchronous writes more common, buffer-able, faster
 Free-behind and read-ahead – techniques to optimize sequential access
 Reads frequently slower than writes

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.14 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Recovery
 Consistency checking – compares data in directory structure with data blocks on
disk, and tries to fix inconsistencies
 Can be slow and sometimes fails

 Use system programs to back up data from disk to another storage device (magnetic
tape, other magnetic disk, optical)

 Recover lost file or disk by restoring data from backup

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.15 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Overview of Mass Storage Structure
 Magnetic disks provide bulk of secondary storage of modern computers
 Drives rotate at 60 to 250 times per second
 Transfer rate is rate at which data flow between drive and computer
 Positioning time (random-access time) is time to move disk arm to desired cylinder (seek time) and
time for desired sector to rotate under the disk head (rotational latency)
 Head crash results from disk head making contact with the disk surface
 That’s bad
 Disks can be removable
 Drive attached to computer via I/O bus
 Busses vary, including EIDE, ATA, SATA, USB, Fibre Channel, SCSI, SAS, Firewire
 Host controller in computer uses bus to talk to disk controller built into drive or storage array

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.16 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Moving-head Disk Mechanism

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.17 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Magnetic Disks
 Platters range from .85” to 14” (historically)
 Commonly 3.5”, 2.5”, and 1.8”
 Range from 30GB to 3TB per drive
 Performance
 Transfer Rate – theoretical – 6 Gb/sec
 Effective Transfer Rate – real – 1Gb/sec
 Seek time from 3ms to 12ms – 9ms common for desktop
drives
 Average seek time measured or calculated based on 1/3 of
tracks
 Latency based on spindle speed
 1 / (RPM / 60) = 60 / RPM
 Average latency = ½ latency

(From Wikipedia)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.18 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Magnetic Disk Performance
 Access Latency = Average access time = average seek time + average latency
 For fastest disk 3ms + 2ms = 5ms
 For slow disk 9ms + 5.56ms = 14.56ms

 Average I/O time = average access time + (amount to transfer / transfer rate) + controller overhead

 For example to transfer a 4KB block on a 7200 RPM disk with a 5ms average seek time, 1Gb/sec transfer rate with
a .1ms controller overhead =
 5ms + 4.17ms + 0.1ms + transfer time =
 Transfer time = 4KB / 1Gb/s * 8Gb / GB * 1GB / 10242KB = 32 / (10242) = 0.031 ms
 Average I/O time for 4KB block = 9.27ms + .031ms = 9.301ms

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.19 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Magnetic Tape
 Was early secondary-storage medium
 Evolved from open spools to cartridges
 Relatively permanent and holds large quantities of data
 Access time slow
 Random access ~1000 times slower than disk
 Mainly used for backup, storage of infrequently-used data, transfer medium between systems
 Kept in spool and wound or rewound past read-write head
 Once data under head, transfer rates comparable to disk
 140MB/sec and greater
 200GB to 1.5TB typical storage
 Common technologies are LTO-{3,4,5} and T10000

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.20 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Disk Structure
 Disk drives are addressed as large 1-dimensional arrays of logical blocks, where the logical block is the
smallest unit of transfer

 Low-level formatting creates logical blocks on physical media

 The 1-dimensional array of logical blocks is mapped into the sectors of the disk sequentially
 Sector 0 is the first sector of the first track on the outermost cylinder
 Mapping proceeds in order through that track, then the rest of the tracks in that cylinder, and then
through the rest of the cylinders from outermost to innermost
 Logical to physical address should be easy
 Except for bad sectors
 Non-constant # of sectors per track via constant angular velocity

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.21 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Disk Scheduling
 The operating system is responsible for using hardware efficiently — for the disk drives, this means having
a fast access time and disk bandwidth

 Minimize seek time

 Seek time  seek distance

 Disk bandwidth is the total number of bytes transferred, divided by the total time between the first request
for service and the completion of the last transfer

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.22 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Disk Scheduling (Cont.)
 There are many sources of disk I/O request
 OS
 System processes
 Users processes
 I/O request includes input or output mode, disk address, memory address, number of sectors to transfer
 OS maintains queue of requests, per disk or device
 Idle disk can immediately work on I/O request, busy disk means work must queue
 Optimization algorithms only make sense when a queue exists
 Note that drive controllers have small buffers and can manage a queue of I/O requests (of varying “depth”)

 Several algorithms exist to schedule the servicing of disk I/O requests

 The analysis is true for one or many platters
 We illustrate scheduling algorithms with a request queue (0-199)

98, 183, 37, 122, 14, 124, 65, 67

Head pointer 53

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.23 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 FCFS
Illustration shows total head movement of 640 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.24 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SSTF
 Shortest Seek Time First selects the request with the minimum seek time from the current head position

 SSTF scheduling is a form of SJF scheduling; may cause starvation of some requests

 Illustration shows total head movement of 236 cylinders

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.25 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SSTF (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.26 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SCAN
 The disk arm starts at one end of the disk, and moves toward the other end, servicing requests until it gets
to the other end of the disk, where the head movement is reversed and servicing continues.

 SCAN algorithm Sometimes called the elevator algorithm

 Illustration shows total head movement of 208 cylinders

 But note that if requests are uniformly dense, largest density at other end of disk and those wait the longest

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.27 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.28 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-SCAN
 Provides a more uniform wait time than SCAN

 The head moves from one end of the disk to the other, servicing requests as it goes
 When it reaches the other end, however, it immediately returns to the beginning of the disk, without
servicing any requests on the return trip

 Treats the cylinders as a circular list that wraps around from the last cylinder to the first one

 Total number of cylinders?

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.29 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-SCAN (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.30 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-LOOK
 LOOK a version of SCAN, C-LOOK a version of C-SCAN

 Arm only goes as far as the last request in each direction, then reverses direction immediately, without first
going all the way to the end of the disk

 Total number of cylinders?

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.31 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 C-LOOK (Cont.)

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.32 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Selecting a Disk-Scheduling Algorithm
 SSTF is common and has a natural appeal

 SCAN and C-SCAN perform better for systems that place a heavy load on the disk
 Less starvation

 Performance depends on the number and types of requests

 Requests for disk service can be influenced by the file-allocation method

 And metadata layout

 The disk-scheduling algorithm should be written as a separate module of the operating system, allowing it to be
replaced with a different algorithm if necessary

 Either SSTF or LOOK is a reasonable choice for the default algorithm

 What about rotational latency?

 Difficult for OS to calculate

 How does disk-based queueing effect OS queue ordering efforts?

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.33 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Disk Management
 Low-level formatting, or physical formatting — Dividing a disk into sectors that the disk controller can read and
write
 Each sector can hold header information, plus data, plus error correction code (ECC)
 Usually 512 bytes of data but can be selectable
 To use a disk to hold files, the operating system still needs to record its own data structures on the disk
 Partition the disk into one or more groups of cylinders, each treated as a logical disk
 Logical formatting or “making a file system”
 To increase efficiency most file systems group blocks into clusters
 Disk I/O done in blocks
 File I/O done in clusters
 Raw disk access for apps that want to do their own block management, keep OS out of the way (databases for
example)
 Boot block initializes system
 The bootstrap is stored in ROM
 Bootstrap loader program stored in boot blocks of boot partition
 Methods such as sector sparing used to handle bad blocks

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.34 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Booting from a Disk in Windows

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.35 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Swap-Space Management
 Swap-space — Virtual memory uses disk space as an extension of main memory
 Less common now due to memory capacity increases

 Swap-space can be carved out of the normal file system, or, more commonly, it can be in a separate disk partition
(raw)

 Swap-space management
 4.3BSD allocates swap space when process starts; holds text segment (the program) and data segment
 Kernel uses swap maps to track swap-space use
 Solaris 2 allocates swap space only when a dirty page is forced out of physical memory, not when the virtual
memory page is first created
 File data written to swap space until write to file system requested
 Other dirty pages go to swap space due to no other home
 Text segment pages thrown out and reread from the file system as needed

 What if a system runs out of swap space?

 Some systems allow multiple swap spaces

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.36 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 Data Structures for Swapping on
Linux Systems

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition 10.37 Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013
 End of Chapter 10

Operating System Concepts – 9th Edition Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne ©2013