Boot charting

[David Nielsen]

lør, 10 12 2005 kl. 15:58 -0500, skrev Phillip Susi:
> 
> I searched and searched and it seems that the Linux community still 
> feels ( wrongly imho ) that there is no need to defragment hard disks. 
> Because of this, it seems there is no way to defragment the disk in such 
> a way that the files that readahead-list precaches are all packed in 
> order at the start of the disk, which would greatly speed up the boot 
> process.

As a sidenote to this the upcoming Reiser4 filesystem is able to use a
repacker (same thing as defragmentation tool really), so I wouldn't be
surprised if we would have this functionality in the near future.
Historically our filesystems have laid out data in a near optimal way so
defraging hasn't been a problem untill now, and it always posed a
problem being a slow cumbersome process - I'm my impression that the
Reiser4 repacker will run little by little in the background using only
idle time to repack the disk so this wouldn't even be felt by the user
as compared to the full defrag tools someone like Norton would provide
for Windows.

- David Nielsen