Re: Optimizing disk-I/O [was Re: [ANNOUNCE] hotplug-ng 001 release]

Valdis.Kletnieks
2005-02-15T21:21:57Z

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On Tue, 15 Feb 2005 13:56:14 CST, Linas Vepstas said:

> Now I like this idea. It need not have anything to do with startup,
> or with any particular program or distro whatsoever. Rather, one
> would have a daemon keeping track of disk i/o patterns, and constantly
> trying to figure out if there is a rearrangement of the sectors on disk
> that would minimize i/o seeks based on past uasge.

More prior art - a company called FDR made a disk compactor product for IBM's
OS series, and I seem to remember a SHARE (IBM mainframe user group) tape that
had a program to read the I/O trace table and generate an optimal "what goes
where" command stream for FDR's software. Again a late 70s to early 80s thing.

(Probably not enough to be "prior art" by itself, but certainly goes towards
the "obviousness to a practitioner in the field" criteria - if *I* knew about it
as a junior sysadmin at a college in middle-of-nowhere upstate NY knew about
it in 1983.. ;)

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