As you might know, I'm always looking for ways to speed up my system boot.
Today I discovered fcache
. It was created by Jex Axboe, from CFQ io-elevator fame, and was announced at LKML on 2006-05-15. He aims to reduce bootup times by speeding up access to files and does this laying out data linearly on disc. It happens in an extra partition that will hold cache data, this cache will be written by fcache
while in "priming" mode: every read from cached partition will be appended to cache. While in "normal" operation mode, it will lookup data from cache instead of real file system.
This makes a solution even better than the one I envisioned before, that was automatic on-line defragmentation. It's simpler, more efficient and works for every file systems!
Thank you, Jens!