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+[[meta copyright="Copyright © 2008, 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc."]]
+
+[[meta license="""[[toggle id="license" text="GFDL 1.2+"]][[toggleable
+id="license" text="Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this
+document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or
+any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
+Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.  A copy of the license
+is included in the section entitled
+[[GNU_Free_Documentation_License|/fdl]]."]]"""]]
+
+[[meta title="Disk I/O Performance Tuning"]]
+
+The most obvious reason for the Hurd feeling slow compared to mainstream
+systems like GNU/Linux, is very slow harddisk access.
+
+The reason for this slowness is lack and/or bad implementation of common
+optimisation techniques, like scheduling reads and writes to minimalize head
+movement; effective block caching; effective reads/writes to partial blocks;
+reading/writing multiple blocks at once; and read-ahead.  The
+[[ext2_filesystem_server|hurd/translator/ext2fs]] might also need some
+optimisations at a higher logical level.
+
+The goal of this project is to analyze the current situation, and implement/fix
+various optimisations, to achieve significantly better disk performance. It
+requires understanding the data flow through the various layers involved in
+disk acces on the Hurd ([[filesystem|hurd/virtual_file_system]],
+[[pager|hurd/libpager]], driver), and general experience with
+optimising complex systems.  That said, the killing feature we are definitely
+missing is the read-ahead, and even a very simple implementation would bring
+very big performance speedups.
+
+Possible mentors: ?
+
+Exercise: Make some modification in at least one of the components involved in
+disk I/O. (More specific suggestions welcome... :-) )