Tested readahead-fedora - some notes

[Raphael Geissert]

Hi Petter,

On Wednesday 12 August 2009 03:49:22 Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> Hi, Raphael.  I tested the readahead-fedora package available from
> <URL:http://alioth.debian.org/~geissert/readahead-fedora_1.4.9+090528+3d3a7
>c-1.dsc>, and it seemed to work.

Great, thanks. Did you test it on a machine with a separate /usr partition?

>Using it made kdm fail to start X with a 
> working keyboard, but I suspect that is another problem.

I don't see how readahead could cause that problem.

>
> I noticed a bug in the debian/init.d/stop-readahead-fedora LSB header.
> it should stop the readahead process in all runlevels, at least 1-5.
> At the moment it only runs in runlevel 2.

Right, good point.

>
> I noticed the profile run was very fast.  That is good.  I also tried
> the daily cron job, but it did not modify the files in /var/lib/.
>

In the latest set of changes I made the stop init script manually run the 
cronjob if it is +x. Like I said on IRC there's still one advantage on 
running readahead with the unsorted lists which is that it also stat()s and 
preloads part of the inodes table of the group the file belongs to; but I've 
been thinking how to properly integrate that.

> The files to read can not live in /var/, as this is not mounted in
> early boot on a system with separate /var/.  This need to be fixed.  I
> suspect /etc/ is the only safe place to store these files.
>

The problem with moving them to /etc is that users should not manually modify 
them. Previous releases of readahead used to store the lists in /etc but they 
later moved them to /var.

Cheers,
-- 
Raphael Geissert - Debian Developer
www.debian.org - get.debian.net