The Deadline I/O Scheduler was introduced to solve the problems with the 2.4 I/O scheduler, and traditional elevator algorithms in general. The Linus Elevator maintains a sorted list of pending I/O requests. The I/O request at the head of the queue is the next one to be serviced. The Deadline I/O Scheduler keeps this queue, but kicks things up a notch by introducing two additional queues: the read FIFO queue, and the write FIFO queue. The items in each of these queues are sorted by submission time (effectively, the first in is the first out). The read FIFO queue, as its name suggests, contains only read requests. The write FIFO queue, likewise, contains only write requests. Each request in the FIFO queues is assigned an expiration value. The read FIFO queue has an expiration time of 500 milliseconds. The write FIFO queue has an expiration time of five seconds.

When a new I/O request is submitted, it is insertion-sorted into the standard queue, and placed at the tail of its respective (read or write) FIFO queue. Normally, the hard drive is sent I/O requests from the head of the standard sorted queue. This maximizes global throughput by minimizing seeks, as the normal queue is sorted by block number (as with the Linus Elevator).

When the item at the head of one of the FIFO queues grows older than the expiration value associated with its queue, however, the I/O scheduler stops dispatching I/O requests from the standard queue, and begins servicing requests from that queue—the request at the head of the FIFO queue is serviced, plus a couple of extras for good measure. The I/O scheduler needs to check and handle only the requests at the head of the queue, as those are the oldest requests.

In this manner, the Deadline I/O Scheduler can enforce a soft deadline on I/O requests. Although it makes no promise that an I/O request will be serviced before its expiration time, the I/O scheduler generally services requests near their expiration times. Thus, the Deadline I/O Scheduler continues to provide good global throughput without starving any one request for an unacceptably long time. Because read requests are given shorter expiration times, the writes-starving-reads problem is minimized.

The Anticipatory I/O Scheduler

The Deadline I/O Scheduler’s behavior is good, but not perfect. Recall our discussion on read dependency. With the Deadline I/O Scheduler, the first read request in a series of reads is serviced in short order, at or before its expiration time, and the I/O scheduler then returns to servicing I/O requests from the sorted queue—so far, so good. But suppose the application then swoops in and hits us with another read request? Eventually its expiration time will also approach, and the I/O scheduler will submit it to the disk, which will seek over to promptly handle the request, then seek back to continue handling requests from the sorted queue. This seeking back and forth can continue for some time because many applications exhibit this behavior. While latency is kept to a minimum, global throughput is not very good because the read requests keep coming in, and the disk has to keep seeking back and forth to handle them. Performance would be improved if the disk just took a break to wait for another read, and did not move away to service the sorted queue again. But, unfortunately, by the time the application is scheduled and submits its next dependent read request, the I/O scheduler has already shifted gears.

The problem again stems from those darn dependent reads—each new read request is issued only when the previous one is returned, but by the time the application receives the read data, is scheduled to run, and submits its next read request, the I/O scheduler has moved on, and begun servicing other requests. This results in a wasted pair of seeks for each read: the disk seeks to the read, services it, and then seeks back. If only there was some way for the I/O scheduler to know—to anticipate—that another read would soon be submitted to the same part of the disk, instead of seeking back and forth, it could wait in anticipation of the next read. Saving those awful seeks certainly would be worth a few milliseconds of waiting.

This is exactly how the Anticipatory I/O Scheduler operates. It began life as the Deadline I/O Scheduler, but was gifted with the addition of an anticipation mechanism. When a read request is submitted, the Anticipatory I/O Scheduler services it within its deadline, as usual. Unlike the Deadline I/O Scheduler, however, the Anticipatory I/O Scheduler then sits and waits, doing nothing, for up to six milliseconds. Chances are good that the application will issue another read to the same part of the filesystem during those six milliseconds. If so, that request is serviced immediately, and the Anticipatory I/O Scheduler waits some more. If six milliseconds go by without a read request, the Anticipatory I/O Scheduler decides it has guessed wrong, and returns to whatever it was doing before (i.e., servicing the standard sorted queue). If even a moderate number of requests are anticipated correctly, a great deal of time—two expensive seeks’ worth at each go—is saved. Because most reads are dependent, the anticipation pays off much of the time.