• Daniel Campello
• Hector Lopez
• Luis Useche
• Ricardo Koller
• Raju Rangaswami

Writing data to a page not present in the file-system page cache causes the operating system to synchronously fetch the page into memory before it can be written into. {\em Synchronous} page fetch defines both policy (when) and mechanism (how). However, its read-before-write behavior blocks the writing process. Non-blocking writes eliminate such blocking by buffering the written data elsewhere in memory and unblocking the writing process immediately. Subsequent reads to the updated page locations are also made non-blocking. This new handling of writes to non-cached pages allow processes to overlap more computation with I/O and improves page fetch I/O throughput by increasing fetch parallelism.

• Non-blocking Writes to Files pdf
  Daniel Campello, Hector Lopez, Luis Useche, Ricardo Koller, and Raju Rangaswami
  Proceedings of USENIX File and Storage Technologies (FAST), February, 2015.

• Traces used in the paper titled "Non-blocking Writes to Files", Proceedings of USENIX FAST 2015.

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under grant CNS-1320426 and by a NetApp Faculty Fellowship.