CODEWITHSUNDEEP
clinux
Dervin Thunk
Dervin Thunk

Reputation: 20139

Can I check for disk access at runtime?

I'm running some very specialized experiments for a research project. These experiments call for controlling memory accesses: my application should not, under any circumstances, swap information with the disk. That is, all information the application needs must stay in RAM for the duration of the execution, but it should use as much RAM as possible.

My question is: is there any way I can control disk access by my application, or at least count disk accesses for later analysis?

This is using C and Linux.

Please let me know if I can clarify the question... been working on this for so long I think everybody knows exactly what I'm talking about.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 142

Answers (2)

ott--
ott--

Reputation: 5722

The mlock system call allows you to lock part or all of your process's virtual memory to RAM, thus preventing it from being written to swap space. Notice that another process with root priviledges can still that memory area.

Upvotes: 1

Ion
Ion

Reputation: 334

One thing you can do is actually create a ramfs or RAM file system. Are you working on a unix platform? If so you can check out mount and umount on how to create them.

http://linux.die.net/man/8/mount

http://linux.die.net/man/8/umount

Basically what you do is you create a file system stored in your RAM. You don't have to deal with all the disk read/write time anymore. If i read your question correctly you want to try avoiding disk access if you can. It's very simple to do really since you can have multiple file systems located on both a hard drive and memory.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-create-linux-ram-disk-filesystem/

http://www.alper.net/linuxunix/linux-ram-based-filesystem/

Hope this all helped.

Upvotes: 4

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