Speedying up the boot for Fedora

[Dave Jones]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2005 at 03:20:53PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
 > On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 15:01 +0200, Jean-Eric Cuendet wrote:
 > > Hi,
 > > To speed the boot of Fedora, the taken approach is to readahead the
 > > files needed by the daemons/tools run during boot. This approach works
 > > well but the actual approach is to pre-load some files from a static
 > > defined file. (This is accomplished by /etc/init.d/readahead which reads
 > >   files from /etc/readahead.files)
 > > 
 > > There is IMHO at least 2 problems:
 > > - When the boot process change, either by removing/adding services, the
 > > fiels that must be readahead change. But the readahead.files don't.
 > > - The readahead process don't read the files in the best order to
 > > minimize the head movement on the hard disk
 > 
 > this one is easy to fix btw; I wrote a small tool a while ago (and
 > posted to the list) to sort the file in disk order

Something I noticed a few days ago was that running filefrag
on a freshly installed system shows a lot of files using multiple
extents (sometimes dozens), rather than a single extent.

I've no idea how much difference this would make in the real-world,
(maybe none due to the drive internal read-ahead) but it was surprising
to see bits of openoffice using up 80-90 extents for eg.

		Dave