An efficient buffer management scheme for multimedia file system

File system buffers provide memory space for data being transferred to and from disk and act as caches for the recently used blocks, and the buffer manager usually reads ahead data blocks tu minimize the number of disk accesses. However, if several multimedia files with different consumption rates are accessed simultaneously from the file system in which LRU buffer replacement strategy is used, the read-ahead blocks of the low rate file are unloaded from memory to be used for loading a data block of a high data rate file, therefore they should be reloaded again into memory from disk when these blocks are actually referenced. This paper proposes and implements a new buffer cache management scheme for a multimedia file system and analyzes the performance of the proposal scheme by modifying the file system kernel of FreeBSD. In this proposed scheme, initially, some buffers are allocated to each opened multimedia file, privately, then these buffers are reused for other data blocks of that file when they are loaded from the disk. Moreover, the number of private buffers allocated for the file is dynamically adjusted according to its data rate. An admission control scheme is also proposed to prevent opening of a new file which may cause overloads in the file system. Experimental results comparing proposed scheme with the original FreeBSD and a simple CTL-based model show that the proposed buffer management scheme could support the realtime play back of several multimedia files with various data rates concurrently without helps of a realtime CPU and disk scheduling.