Providing asynchronous file I/O for the Plan 9 operating system
Author(s)
Hickey, Jason, 1981-
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Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Advisor
Russell S. Cox and M. Frans Kaashoek.
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This thesis proposes a mux abstraction that multiplexes messages of a network file protocol to provide asynchronous access to all system resources on the Plan 9 operating system. The mux provides an easy-to-program asynchronous interface alleviating the need to manage multiple connections with different servers. A modified version of the Plan 9 Web server demonstrates that the mux can be used to implement a high-performance server with user-level threads without having to use a kernel thread for each user-level thread. Scalability tests demonstrate that the mux implementation scales well with hundreds of clients and hundreds of servers. Furthermore, the user-threaded version of the web server performs comparably with the kernel-threaded implementation on disk bound workloads and exhibits an 18% decrease in performance on in memory workloads. These results suggest that the mux could provide performance benefits for more intricate applications that can exploit the fine-grained control of user-level scheduling.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 55).
Date issued
2004Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer SciencePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.