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

Daniel Phillips
2002-10-07T17:42:56Z

On Sunday 06 October 2002 17:19, Martin J. Bligh wrote:
> > Then there's the issue of application startup. There's not enough
> > read ahead. This is especially sad, as the order of page faults is
> > at least partially predictable.
>
> Is the problem really, fundamentally a lack of readahead in the
> kernel? Or is it that your application is huge bloated pig?

Readahead isn't the only problem, but it is a huge problem. The current
readahead model is per-inode, which is very little help with lots of small
files, especially if they are fragmented or out of order. There are various
ways to fix this; they are all difficult[1]. Fortunately, we can call this
"tuning work" so it can be done during the stable series.

[1] We could teach each filesystem how to read ahead across directories, or
we could teach the vfs how to do physical readahead. Choose your poison.

--
Daniel