web commit by SamuelThibault: read-ahead ftw

1 files changed, 5 insertions, 3 deletions

diff --git a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
index ec4b6631..7b45f666 100644
--- a/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
+++ b/community/gsoc/project_ideas.mdwn
@@ -430,14 +430,16 @@ 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. The ext2 filesystem driver might also
-need some optimisation at a higher logical level.
+reading/writing multiple blocks at once; and read-ahead. The ext2 filesystem
+driver 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, pager, driver), and general experience with
-optimising complex systems.
+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.
 
 ## VM tuning