Operating System I/O Speculation: How Two Invocations Are Faster Than One

Abstract: We present an in-kernel disk prefetcher which usesspeculative execution to determine what data an applicationis likely to require in the near future. Byplacing our design within the operating system, weprovide several benets compared to the previousapplication-level design. Not only is our system easierto implement and deploy, but by handling pagefaults as well as traditionalle-access methods weare able to apply speculative execution to swappingapplications, which often spend the...