Project Status Update No. 8

Welcome to the precached project status update No. 8!

In this (long) cycle we mainly concentrated on optimizing performance on very old machines and on squashing bugs throughout the whole project.

What has been achieved

We added two new companion tools called precached-trigger as well as precached-debug. The tool precached-debug currently supports the creation and subsequent access of multiple files which may be used to verify that the precached daemon correctly traces file access patterns. The new tool precached-trigger can be used by unprivileged users to trigger certain predefined actions in the precached daemon. This is needed to support auto-starting of the offline prefetch as soon as the GDM (Gnome Display Manager) shows the password prompt, or when the user has successfully logged in to his or her desktop.

Shell completions for all companion tools are now auto-generated during the build process.

What didn’t quite work out

We needed to revert the change to set the scheduling parameters of the prefetcher threads to a realtime scheduling class (SCHED_RR). It caused livelocks on single core systems and therefor didn’t help performance.

List of new and noteworthy plugins

The release of version 1.2.0 is imminent, so stay tuned…

The precached team

Article Updates

This posting has been edited at: Sat May 12 13:20:00