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SubjectRe: Heuristic readahead for filesystems
On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 03:21:37PM -0400, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, 11 Sep 2002, Oliver Neukum wrote:
> > Am Mittwoch, 11. September 2002 20:43 schrieb Xuan Baldauf:

> > > > Aio should be able to do it. But even that want help you with the stat
> > > > data.
> > >
> > > Aio would help me announcing stat() usage for the future?
> >
> > No, it won't. But it would solve the issue of reading ahead.
> > Stating needs a kernel implementation of 'stat ahead'
> > -
>
> I think this is discussed in the future. Write-ahead is the
> next problem solved. ?;)

Gating back to the original issue which was "readahead" of
stat() info...

The userland open of a directory could trigger an advance
reading of the directory data and of the inode structs of
all it's immediate members. Almost all instances of a
usermode open on a directory will be doing fstats. Even a
command line ls often has options (colour, -F, etc) turned on
by default that require fstat on all the entries.
The question would be how far ahead of the user app would
the kernel be.

I could possibly see having a fcntl() for directories to
pre-read just the first block of each file to accelerate
file-managers that use magic and perhaps forestall readahead
pulling in more than magic will use.

--
________________________________________________________________
J.W. Schultz Pegasystems Technologies
email address: jw@pegasys.ws

Remember Cernan and Schmitt
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