Implementing and Testing the APEX I/O Scheduler in Linux

Abstract

This thesis seeks to test an implementation of the APEX I/O scheduler to see how it compares to modern schedulers and whether it better serves mixed-media workloads. APEX is a scheduling framework that seeks to provide deterministic guarantees for storage service to applications. The implementation is done in Linux, a modern open source operating system kernel that includes a loadable scheduler framework. The implementation compares favorably with the existing schedulers on Linux, despite problems inherent in the assumptions made in the design of mixed-media schedulers about modern operating system environments