Re: [ck] Re: [PATCH] fcache: a remapping boot cache

From: André Goddard Rosa
Date: Sat Jun 24 2006 - 08:02:18 EST


On 6/24/06, Jens Axboe <axboe@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sat, Jun 24 2006, James wrote:
> Set this up on my laptop yesterday with some awesome results. I'm
> using 2.6.17-ck1 which has v2.1.
>
> Heres some bootcharts, before, after, and a prime run.
>
> http://archlinux.org/~james/normal.png
> http://archlinux.org/~james/fs-fcache.png
> http://archlinux.org/~james/fs-fcache-prime.png
>
> Repeated boots show about the same 6 second improvement, 32 down to 26
> seconds. Looking at the slowdowns in the fs-fcache run, most are due
> to cpu load, waiting on network or, modprobe, and not disk access. X
> now starts nearly instantaneously.
>
> As an experiment, I primed my cache right through to logging into my
> desktop environment. It was so effective, that now when I login, the
> GNOME splash screen only flickers onto the screen briefly, and the
> panels appear almost instantly. This is a big improvment over without
> fcache, where you'd see each component of GNOME being loaded on the
> splash screen, nautilus, metacity, and the panels would take quite a
> bit of time to render and load all their applets.
>
> Impressive work, I hope to see it broadened to other filesystems,
> improved and merged to vanilla soon because it has clear improvements.

Thanks for giving it a spin! I have plans to implement some improvements
on monday that will speed it up even more, I hope I can talk you into
retesting it then. Basically it make sure we always get full speed out
of the drive by extending the 4kb reads with a sliding window cache.
That will help both drive efficiency, and also speed up the cases where
sub sequent boots differ just a little bit from the primed boot (often
the case with parallel init scripts). It should win you a few seconds
more in total, would be my guess.

I hope to be able to extend it to xfs and reiser in the very near future
as well, should not be hard to do.

Impressive good work, Jens!

Do you have any distribution in contact with you already?

Thank you so much, I look forward to test it on xfs.

Best regards,
--
[]s,
André Goddard
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