Speedying up the boot for Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

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
> - The readahead process don't rearrange the files on disk so the 
> readahead process can be quicker.
>
> Why not implement a dynamic mechanism to know which files need to be 
> read in readahead?
> - End of kernel init
> - Register a (KProbes or LSM?) hook that listen to which files are read
> - Boot the system
> - End of system boot, read the files that were read during boot itself.
> - Update the readahead.files file so the readahead could be quicker.
>
> A second step could be to rearrange the files so the readahead could 
> read them without too much head movemement on the HD. Perhaps with 
> help of e2fsdefrag?
>
> Do you have any comment?
> -jec
>
This sort of discussion would probably be more relevant in the 
Fedora-devel list. Please read the Fedora-devel list archives first. 
Kindly move the discussion there if you wish to continue

regards
Rahul