Spooling

Spooling is an acronym for simultaneous peripheral operations on line. Spooling refers to putting data of various I/O jobs in a buffer. This buffer is a special area in memory or hard disk which is accessible to I/O devices. Operating system does the following activites related to distributed environment.

• OS handles I/O device data spooling as devices have different data access rates.
• OS maintains the spooling buffer which provides a waiting station where data can rest while the slower device catches up.
• OS maintains parallel computation because of spooling process as a computer can perform I/O in parallel fashin. It becomes possible to have the computer read data from a tape, write data to disk and to write out to a tape printer while it is doing its computing task.