El Mon, 14 Feb 2005 18:04:00 -0500, Lee Revell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> escribió:
> Last I heard Gentoo does not even do it by default. > > I don't see why so much effort goes into improving boot time on the > kernel side when the most obvious user space problem is ignored. There's stuff that it could be done in the kernel to help improving those numbers, IMHO. xp logs all the io done the first two minutes after booting. The next time it boots it tries to read all those files at once so the programs will find stuff in memory instead of having to do lots of small seeks. Some people in the linux field have got a list of the files used at startup and they've thrown it at a "readhead" script, which seems to help but IMHO it's somewhat "hacky" compared with the xp's trick. xp also does that when you start a program, it saves a log of all the io done and it preloads it efficiently at startup - it improves "cold-cache" loading times a _lot_. I haven't seen any alternative for that in the linux world, and being able to keep track of al the io done by a given process would fix that (some people has put used printk's for that, but i think it can be done better) Also, it analyzes all those io "logs" and defragments (in background every 3 days, and with low load without the user noticing it) the disk according to the _use_ of the systems. Linux kernel can keep a file unfragmented, but currently there's no way linux can do decisions like "this system starts openoffice, so I'm going to move the binaries to another place of the disk where they'll load faster" or "when X program uses /lib/libfoo.so it also uses /lib/libbar.so, so I'm going to put those two together in the disk because that will avoid seeks". Kernel only can keep a single file unfragmented, but it doesn't know about how several files must be (un)fragmented between them. Being able to defragment things seems to be the one fix that (even mac os x does it) Userspace is where the problem is, but it's not going to be fixed. Ever. If something, it's going to be worse - it's how software works. And even if you make openoffice "fast", you still could _improve_ things with the tricks described above. Disks are too slow, and things like demand-loading executables generate too many small seeks, and programs can't control demand-loading so I don't think userspace is the only with work to do. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
