tagged queueing

tagged queueing

(hardware)A method allowing a device or controller toprocess commands received from a device driver out of order.It requires that the device driver attaches a tag to eachcommand which the controller or device can later use toidentify the response to the command.

Tagged queueing can speed up processing considerably if acontroller serves devices of very different speeds, such as anSCSI controller serving a mix of CD-ROMs and high-speeddisks. In such cases if a request to fetch data from theCD-ROM is shortly followed by a request to read from the disk,the controller doesn't have to wait for the CD-ROM to fetchthe data, it can instead instruct the disk to fetch the dataand return the value to the device driver, while the CD-ROM isprobably still seeking.