• Journal of KIISE
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• v.41 no.10
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• pp.832-837
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• 2014

Application loading speed can be improved by timely prefetching disk blocks likely to be needed by an application. However, existing prefetchers -- if they are not specialized to a particular application -- incur high overheads and are poor at identifying the blocks that will actually be required. There are many sequences in which blocks may be needed and, even if two access sequences are identical, block tracing and access timings can be affected significantly by the state of the buffer cache. We propose a new application-independent software-based prefetching technique, in which breakpoints are inserted at appropriate places in an application to collect the information on correlations between the blocks and to prefetch the potential blocks ahead of their schedule based on it. Experiments on an HDD-based desktop PC demonstrated an average 30% reduction in application launch time and 15% in general I/O, while reducing the wasted overhead.