Real-time I/O scheduling, specifically disk scheduling, has frequently received far less attention than other aspects of real-time theory. Nevertheless, several proposals have addressed this area meaning to merge the real-time CPU scheduling along with traditional I/O scheduling to provide real-time disk response. These proposals are all based on simplistic and unrealistic disk models that only consider mechanical parameters, leaving apart capabilities such as pre-fetching or write-caching.

In our opinion, real-time I/O scheduling algorithms should take advantage of these additional mechanisms to increase sensitively I/O performance.

In this paper, we present our first approach to a new model of a modern hard-disk (taken advantage of its features, specifically, its capability to identify streaming access patterns and pre-fetching a number of sectors belonging this stream).

Besides, we also describe how we have implemented our experiments in RTLinux.

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