On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 10:34:18 +0800 Shaohua Li [off-list ref] wrote:

quoted

quoted

  Under a harddisk based netbook with Meego, the metadata readahead
reduced about 3.5s boot time in average from total 16s.

That's a respectable speedup.  And it *needs* to be a good speedup,
given how hacky all of this is!

But then..  reducing bootup time on a laptop/desktop/server by 3.5s
isn't exactly a world-shattering benefit, is it?  Is it worth all the
hacky code?

a laptop/desktop/server need read more data from hard disks, this will
give more bootup time saving I think, though not tested yet.

Well, the whole point of the patch is to improve boot times, so the
more boot-time testing you can do, the better that is!

quoted

It would be much more valuable if those 3.5 seconds were available to
devices which really really care about bootup times, but very few of
those devices use rotating disks nowadays, I expect?

Currently most popular netbooks are using rotating disks actually. And
this will benefit laptop/desktop too.

But my point is that three seconds boot-time improvement for a system
which has an uptime of days or months isn't terribly exciting.

What *would* be terribly exciting is a three-second improvement for
cameras, cellphones, etc.  But they don't use spinning disks.

Can we expect *any* benefit for flash-type storage devices?  If so, how
much?