From 46fc3e7b4e7233a0ac981ac9084b55217318d04d Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Fengguang Wu Date: Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:47:57 -0700 Subject: [PATCH] readahead: add look-ahead support to __do_page_cache_readahead() Add look-ahead support to __do_page_cache_readahead(). It works by - mark the Nth backwards page with PG_readahead, (which instructs the page's first reader to invoke readahead) - and only do the marking for newly allocated pages. (to prevent blindly doing readahead on already cached pages) Look-ahead is a technique to achieve I/O pipelining: While the application is working through a chunk of cached pages, the kernel reads-ahead the next chunk of pages _before_ time of need. It effectively hides low level I/O latencies to high level applications. Signed-off-by: Fengguang Wu Cc: Steven Pratt Cc: Ram Pai Cc: Rusty Russell Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds --- Reading git-format-patch failed