Re: The reason to call it 3.0 is the desktop (was Re: [OT] 2.6 not 3.0 - (NUMA))

Linus Torvalds
2002-10-07T19:19:43Z

On Mon, 7 Oct 2002, Daniel Phillips wrote:
>
> Devices have a few MB of readahead cache, the kernel can have thousands of
> times as much.

I don't think that is in the least realistic.

There's _no_ way that the krenel could do physical readahead for more than
a few tens or hundreds of kB - the latency impact would just be too much
to handle, and the VM impact is not likely insignificant either.

So the device readahead is _not_ noticeably smaller than what the kernel
can reasonably do, and it does a better job of it (ie disks can fill track
buffers optimally, depending on where the head hits etc).

Linus