1. Refinements of Simulation System
The simulation system can be refined in several ways to make it a better model of real file systems.
- Instead of a single disk controller, the simulation system can be extended to support a multiple number of disk controllers, which relives I/O congestions through a single data channel.
- The input commands can be generated with non-uniform distributions to better model file operations in a real system. For example, they can be generated with more read commands over write commands, and with heavier I/O demands on some devices, etc.
2. Refinements of PV Algorithm
The simple PV algorithm is very simple and easy to implement, but it does has the following two weaknesses. First, its cache effect may not be optimal. This is because as soon as there is no free buffer, all requesting processes will be blocked at (1) in getblk(), even if their needed buffer may already exist in the buffer cache. Second, when a process wakes up from the freelist semaphore queue, it may find the needed buffer already exists but BUSY, in which case it will be blocked again at (4). Strictly speaking, the process has been woken up unnecessarily since it gets blocked twice. The reader may consult (Wang 2015) for an improved algorithm, which is optimal in terms of process switches and its cache performance is also better.
Source: Wang K.C. (2018), Systems Programming in Unix/Linux, Springer; 1st ed. 2018 edition.