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
- Triggers: Support triggers (perform certain predefined actions in precached) by unprivileged users
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
- Rewording
- Clarifications