[Linux-cachefs] Simple question

[Henk Poley]

Can cachefs be used to cache just any mount, like on Solaris (also used with 
mounting slow CD-ROMs), or is it only for NFS?

The reason I ask this is for something rather different and probably less 
important than proper caching of networkdrives, but here it goes:

Booting a UNIX server or desktop has always be kind of slow, and though with 
most Linux distro's it isn't particular bad there's lots of improvement 
possible. ~2m30s is 5 times as much as the (cheating) Windows XP startup. 
People -for example from Ubuntu linux- are currently looking at programs 
which are run at startup to analyze what is slowing it down. They have found 
some bottlenecks, but this will probably only be part of the puzzle. Loading 
them from disk fast is another part.

There have been experiments with live "preloading" files used at boottime, but 
as since these files are stored all over the disk this hasn't knocked off 
that much time. In the end someone tried copying the files needed at boottime 
to a new partition so the boot files were all next to each other, and after 
that copying the rest of the filesystem. This worked much better, but it's a 
rather cumbersome thing to do (need to pick files, takes lots of time to 
copy, etc. etc.). With cachefs everything should be solved automagicly.

So basicly the next part of my question is, would say a 128MB cachefs 
partition help in the bootprocess by bringing all the files together? 
(transparent copies of the files, that is)

	Henk Poley <><