Studies of file access patterns in embedded systems

Question

I am considering what elements an operating system for Network On Chip systems might have and the issue of file systems looms large. NoCs have an embedded heritage, and their domain of use (at least initially) is likely to be similar tasks to embedded systems.

But I cannot find any studies of embedded system file access patterns - there are a number of published studies on scientific and super computing file access patterns I have been able to read but nothing on embedded systems.

Can anyone point me to some good papers on this?

• vonbrand: I'd suspect that will depend a lot on the exact application.
• adrianmcmenamin: There are various studies for HPC environments which run over the broad category of programs run on these machines, I was wondering if there was either something similar for the embedded domain or something which looks at a common application domain (eg video processing)

Answer 1

There is a good paper titled "The Case for Efficient File Access Pattern Modeling" by Thomas M. Kroeger and Darrell D. E. Long. It reviews two classic model for file access pattern "The first model is based on a graph, that keeps frequency counts for all files accessed within a window following an access to each file. The second model was adapted from the text compression technique finite multi-order context modeling (FMOC), to track file access patterns. It uses a tree to keep frequency counts of access patterns, tracking a finite number of multiple-order patterns."

I think these techniques could be applied for different small scale file systems such as hard disk, flash memory, etc on pc or embeded systems.

This paper "Analysis of Disk Access Patterns on File Systems for Content Addressable Storage" written by Kuniyasu Suzaki, Kengo Iijima, Toshiki Yagi, and Cyrille Artho is also very useful, while the OS of many embedded systems are Linux-based.