User-level disk-bandwidth control for resource-borrowing network applications

This paper presents the design and implementation of DiscNice, a mechanism for controlling disk bandwidth at the user-level. To throttle disk I/O at the user-level, DiscNice infers what the internal behavior of the underlying OS is and predicts the disk I/O size that is incurred by file I/O. To infer internal kernel behavior, we extensively used a concept called the graybox technology and elaborated it to predict the disk I/O behavior. In the graybox technology, the underlying OS is treated as a graybox, which means that we could exploit: 1) our knowledge of the OS, 2) the state information the OS exposes to us, and 3) how the OS reacts to various operations to predict the internal kernel behavior. By exploiting the graybox knowledge on Linux, we developed a graybox technique for predicting the disk I/O behavior. Our technique could also be applied to Windows XP with minor modifications because it does not rely on a detailed knowledge of Linux