Boot-time improvements

[Krzysztof Lichota]

2008/9/11 Timo Jyrinki <timo.jyrinki at gmail.com>:
> 2008/9/10 Przemysław Kulczycki <przemekkulczycki at gmail.com>:
>> Maybe we could achieve it using Prefetch?
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/Specs/Prefetch
>> https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomaticBootAndApplicationPrefetchingSpec
>
> Prefetch would be nice, and definitely would improve the user
> experience. In the end, it would however not fix the problem with
> seeking to thousands of different files / positions. The only way to
> fix that problem is to go with sequential, big files, either by
> precisely reordering stuff on the disk in an area that can be made
> 100% sequential, or by copying files to a "cache" of sort, being a
> single sequential file which contains everything needed and is updated
> when needed.

As an author of Prefetch, I cannot agree that it would not fix seeks ;)
Part of my implementation, not enabled by default as it is highly
experimental, is ext3 defragmenter which puts all files for prefetch
in one place on disk, so the requests to read them can be merged into
big streaming reads.

-- 

	Krzysztof Lichota