On Sat, Nov 26, 2005 at 11:17:55AM +0800, Wu Fengguang wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2005 at 04:43:17PM +0100, Diego Calleja wrote:
> > Recently, a openoffice hacker wrote in his blog that the kernel was
> > culprit of applications not starting as fast as in other systems.
> > Most of the reasons he gave were wrong, but there was a interesting
> > one: When you start your system, you've lots of free memory. Since
> > you have lots of memory, he said it was reasonable to expect that
> > kernel would readahead *heavily* everything it can to fill that
> > memory as soon as possible (hoping that what you readahead'ed was
> > part of the kde/gnome/openoffice libraries etc) and go back to the
> > normal behaviour when your free memory is used by caches etc.
> > "Teorically" it looks like a nice heuristic for desktops. Does
> > adaptative readahead does something like this?
> 
> It's interesting ;)
> In fact some distributions do have a read-ahead script to preload files on
> startup. The readahead system call should be enough for this purpose:
> 
> NAME
>        readahead - perform file readahead into page cache

posix_fadvise() with        POSIX_FADV_WILLNEED hint?
              The specified data will be accessed in the near future.

-- 
Tomasz Torcz                 Morality must always be based on practicality.
zdzichu@irc.-nie.spam-.pl                -- Baron Vladimir Harkonnen