Messages in this thread | | | From | "Lou Grinzo" <> | Subject | File hinting, and a new file flag? | Date | Wed, 14 Jul 1999 08:07:46 -0400 |
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The recent discussion about hinting and speculative execution brought to mind something I've long wondered about: Why is there no way to specify on a file open that you will be reading an entire file sequentially? If the OS knew about the caller's intentions at open time, it could check the available memory and the file's size, and if the ratio were high enough, it could read the whole file into a buffer, or even run a background thread to do read aheads.
This would only apply to read-only access of existing files, obviously, and lacking enough memory, the OS would just ignore the flag an do a normal open. Given how often software processes a file in exactly this way, it seems like an opportunity to let the programmer help the OS perform an optimization.
I've tried to find an example of this being tried in an OS, but come up empty. It's such a simple idea that I have to believe it's been looked at before.
Lou
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