Re: Request: I/O request recording

From: Bart Samwel
Date: Tue Jan 27 2004 - 14:19:29 EST


Andrew Morton wrote:
You could certainly do that. Given disk block #N you need to search all
files on the disk asking "who owns this block". The FIBMAP ioctl can be
used on most filesystems (ext2, ext3, others..) to find out which blocks a
file is using. See bmap.c in

http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/stuff/ext3-tools.tar.gz

Unfortunately you cannot determine a directory's blocks in this way. Ext3's directories live in the /dev/hda1 pagecache anyway. ext2's
directories each have their own pagecache.

OK, I've written something that does this (but only correctly for ext3). I've put it here:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/bootup_prefetch.tar.gz

I haven't had the opportunity to do good measurements, so I don't really know if it even increases performance. If anyone feels like benchmarking this, I'd be very happy to hear from you. I don't really expect performance increases, as the bootup scripts seem to have enough processing to do to keep the system busy even without disk I/O. I wonder if it might make a difference on a faster processor though, my system's kind of sluggish by today's standards.

-- Bart
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