Free Space management

Free-Space Management

Since disk space is limited, we need to reuse the space from deleted files for new files, if possible. (Write-once optical disks only allow one write to any given sector, and thus such reuse is not physically possible.) To keep track of free disk space, the system maintains a free-space list. The free-space list records all free disk blocks—those not allocated to some file or directory. To create a file, we search the free-space list for the required amount of space and allocate that space to the new file. This space is then removed from the free-space list.

When a file is deleted, its disk space is added to the free-space list. The free-space list, despite its name, might not be implemented as a list, as we discuss next. 11.5.1 Bit Vector Frequently, the free-space list is implemented as a bit map or bit vector. Each block is represented by 1 bit. If the block is free, the bit is 1; if the block is allocated, the bit is 0. For example, consider a disk where blocks 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 17, 18, 25,26, and 27 are free and the rest of the blocks are allocated. The free-space bit map would be

                            001111001111110001100000011100000 ...

The main advantage of this approach is its relative simplicity and its efficiency in finding the first free block or n consecutive free blocks on the disk, indeed, many computers supply bit-manipulation instructions that can be used effectively for that purpose. For example, the Intel family starting with the 80386 and the Motorola family starting with the 68020 (processors that have powered PCs and Macintosh systems, respectively) have instructions that return the offset in a word of the first bit with the value 1. One technique for finding the first free block on a system that uses a bit-vector to allocate disk space is to sequentially check each word in the bit map to see whether that value is not 0, since a 0-valued word has all 0 bits and represents a set of allocated blocks.

The first non-0 word is scanned for the first 1 bit, which is the location of the first free block. The calculation of the block number is (number of bits per word) x (number of 0-value words) + offset of first 1 bit. Again, we see hardware features driving software functionality. Unfortunately, bit vectors are inefficient unless the entire vector is kept in main memory (and is written to disk occasionally for recovery needs). Keeping it in main memory is possible for smaller disks but not necessarily for larger ones. A 1.3-GB disk with 512-byte blocks would need a bit map of over 332 KB to track its free blocks, although clustering the blocks in groups of four reduces this number to over 33 KB per disk. A 40-GB disk with 1-KB blocks requires over 5 MB to store its bit map

Linked List

 Another approach to free-space management is to link together all the free disk blocks, keeping a pointer to the first free block in a special location on the disk and caching it in memory. This first block contains a pointer to the next free disk block, and so on. In our earlier example (Section 11.5.1), we would keep a pointer to block 2 as the first free block. Block 2 would contain a pointer to block 3, which would point to block 4, which would point to block 5, which would point to block 8, and so on (Figure 11.10).

The operating system simply needs a free block so that it can allocate thatblock to a file, so the first block in the free list is used. The FAT method incorporates free-block accounting into the allocation data structure. No separate method is needed. 11.5.3 Grouping A modification of the free-list approach is to store the addresses of n free blocks in the first free block. The first n—1 of these blocks are actually free. The last block contains the addresses of another n free blocks, and so on. The addresses of a large number of free blocks can now be found quickly, unlike the situation when the standard linked-list approach is used.

 Counting

 Another approach is to take advantage of the fact that, generally, several contiguous blocks may be allocated or freed simultaneously, particularly when space is allocated with the contiguous-allocation algorithm or through clustering. Thus, rather than keeping a list of n free disk addresses, we can keep the address of the first free block and the number n of free contiguous blocks that follow the first block. Each entry in the free-space list then consists of a disk address and a count. Although each entry requires more space than would a simple disk address, the overall list will be shorter, as long as the count is generally greater than 1.

 However; this scheme is not efficient; to traverse the list, we must read each block, which requires substantial I/O time. Fortunately, traversing the free list is not a frequent action. Usually, the

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