From 788cf51a9546dd1daddf9f550af84c6bbecc94dc Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Thomas Schwinge Date: Thu, 5 Mar 2009 19:20:56 +0100 Subject: community/gsoc/project_ideas: Split into subpages. --- .../gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn | 35 ++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 35 insertions(+) create mode 100644 community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn (limited to 'community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn') diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn new file mode 100644 index 00000000..02e0b675 --- /dev/null +++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas/disk_io_performance.mdwn @@ -0,0 +1,35 @@ +[[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... :-) ) -- cgit v1.2.3