Preloading [WAS: Re: SuSE Project SUPER]

[Linus Walleij <triad df lth se>]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2008, Linus Walleij wrote:

> * They use a LOT of preloading,

I have now looked a bit closer at this, and it is *indeed* looking like a 
major user-perceiveable thing, they preload pretty much everything and 
also add other hints to the kernel of what may be expected to be used 
soonish during boot, early-{x|g|k}dm and so forth.

It is rather crude: the actual mechanisms used are:

preload, source can be found here:
http://download.opensuse.org/distribution/10.3/repo/src-oss/suse/src/preload-0.2-110.src.rpm
anyone knows wher SuSE keep their CVS/SVN/git of this?

Preload then uses readahead(2) or fadvice(2) to do the actual preloading.

Then preload is triggered from /etc/init.d scripts prepended with 
ionice(1) like this:

/usr/bin/ionice -n2 /sbin/preload /etc/preload.d/gdm

Then as can be seen there are some app profiles in /etc/preload.d that 
configure depending on used desktop what to preload, e.g. gdm/kdm, 
Khelpcenter, OpenOffice, Firefox, Gimp (why?), etc.

All code and scripts are heavily SuSEified.

But has this really been under our radar for all this time? The entire 
concept is like 2-3 years old, surely it must have been discussed before? 
(Not that I heard it though...)

I don't have much time in my life but unless someone else starts looking 
at this I will se if it can be Fedorified, target for F10 or so.

And thanks to Jakub for the hints given that allowed me to find this cool
thing...

Linus