Live briefing

Everything about Readahead

System call of the Linux kernel

Readahead is a system call of the Linux kernel that loads a file's contents into the page cache. This prefetches the file so that when it is subsequently accessed, its contents are read from the main memory (RAM) rather than from a hard disk drive (HDD), resulting in much lower file access latencies. Wikipedia →

🧭 Start here: a 6-step reading path

Read the overview: ReadaheadA 5-minute orientation
Pick up a classic book: Linux System ProgrammingThe most-reprinted book on the subject
Read the landmark paper: On the design of a new Linux readahead frameworkCited 51 times
Go sideways: Dracut (software)A closely related topic
Go sideways: SystemdA closely related topic

📖 Definitions

Noun The operation of reading data from a storage medium in advance so that it is immediately available when requested.

🗂️ The subject at a glance

In filesystem

🏆 Landmark papers (most cited)

On the design of a new Linux readahead framework

WU Fengguang, XI Hongsheng, XU Chenfeng · 2008 · ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review · 51 citations
An analytic behavior model for disk drives with readahead caches and request reordering

Elizabeth Shriver, Arif Merchant, John Wilkes · 1998 · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 28 citations
An Asynchronous Striping-Aware Readahead Framework for Disk Arrays in Linux

Sung Hoon BAEK · 2013 · IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems · 1 citations

📚 Books worth reading

Linux System ProgrammingRobert Love · 2007

Ranked by number of editions on Open Library, a rough measure of how lasting a book is.

🔗 Related topics

Dracut (software) Dracut is a set of tools that provide enhanced functionality for automating the Linux boot process. The tool named dracut is used to create a Linux boot…
Systemd systemd is a software suite for system and service management on Linux built to unify service configuration and behavior across Linux distributions. Its…
OpenZFS OpenZFS is an open-source implementation of the ZFS file system and volume manager initially developed by Sun Microsystems for the Solaris operating system…
XFS XFS is a high-performance 64-bit journaling file system created by Silicon Graphics, Inc (SGI) in 1993. It was the default file system in SGI's IRIX operating…
Booting process of Linux The Linux booting process involves multiple stages and is in many ways similar to the BSD and other Unix-style boot processes, from which it is derived…
OS-level virtualization OS-level virtualization is an operating system (OS) virtualization paradigm in which the kernel allows the existence of multiple isolated user space instances…
EFI system partition The EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface) system partition or ESP is a partition on a data storage device (usually a hard disk drive or solid-state drive)…
List of file systems The following lists identify, characterize, and link to more thorough information on file systems. Many older operating systems support only their one…