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  • Auke Kok's avatar
    readahead: chunk on spinning media · 94243ef2
    Auke Kok authored
    Readahead has all sorts of bad side effects depending on your
    storage media. On rotating disks, it may be degrading startup
    performance if enough requests are queued spanning linearly
    over all blocks early at boot, and mount, blkid and friends
    want to insert reads to the start of these block devices after.
    
    The end result is that on spinning disks with ext3/4 that udev
    and mounts take a very long time, and nothing really happens until
    readahead is completely finished.
    
    This has the net effect that the CPU is almost entirely idle
    for the entire period that readahead is working. We could have
    finished starting up quite a lot of services in this time if
    we were smarter at how we do readahead.
    
    This patch sorts all requests into 2 second "chunks" and sub-sorts
    each chunk by block. This adds a single cross-drive seek per "chunk"
    but has the benefit that we will have a lot of the blocks we need
    early on in the boot sequence loaded into memory faster.
    
    For a comparison of how before/after bootcharts look (ext4 on a
    mobile 5400rpm 250GB drive) please look at:
    
        http://foo-projects.org/~sofar/blocked-tests/
    
    There are bootcharts in the "before" and "after" folders where you
    should be able to see that many low-level services finish 5-7
    seconds earlier with the patch applied (after).
    94243ef2