Supporting speculative execution consumes processing cycles, disk bandwidth, and memory. Ideally, speculative execution only uses resources that would otherwise be wasted, so it cannot hurt system performance. This section describes how we restrict the processing time of speculative processes, and the disk bandwidth and memory of speculative prefetches.
Processor cycles. We ensure that speculative execution does not steal processing cycles from normal processes by only scheduling speculative processes when nothing else is runnable. Furthermore, speculative processes are preempted as soon as a normal process becomes runnable. Rather than relying on the operating system's existing priority mechanism, which does not guarantee the desired behavior, we implement this with a simple modification (six additional lines) in the kernel scheduler code.
Prefetching resources. A speculative prefetch can steal disk bandwidth from normal processes by delaying a disk request from a normal process. Morever, premature prefetching can hurt performance, even if all the prefetches are accurate, by causing useful data to be unnecessarily ejected from memory. As suggested by Patterson, et. al. [5], we limit the maximum delay of a normal request by only issuing a prefetch to a disk which has no more than one request outstanding. We also use their idea of a prefetch horizon - a system-dependent, calculable maximum number of prefetches in advance beyond which there is unlikely to be a benefit to initiating a prefetch - to throttle speculative processes that are generating prefetches too quickly. If a speculative process attempts to prefetch further ahead than the prefetch horizon, it is marked non-runnable until its parent process either accesses some of the data it prefetched, or synchronizes it.
Finally, to avoid wasting resources, if a speculative process begins executing process termination code (e.g. as a result of issuing an exit system call or generating a terminating exception), then the operating system checks whether its parent process is terminating. If not, then the speculative process is not allowed to terminate; instead, its memory is reclaimed and it is marked non-runnable until its parent process synchronizes it.