I/O Issues in a Multimedia System

In this paper, we look at the various I/O issues in a multimedia system. In a multimedia server, the disk requests may have constant data rate requirements and need guaranteed service. We study the impact of the real-time nature of the I/O requests on the various components of the I/O system. We study the impact of disk scheduling algorithms on the performance of a multimedia system. We investigate the impact of buer space on the maximumnumber of video streams that can be supported. We show that by making the deadlines larger than the request periods, a larger number of streams can be supported. We also show how deadline extension helps in utilizing multiple disks on a single SCSI bus.