Click to read a recommended LWN article about on-demand read-ahead

On-demand read-ahead is an attempt to simplify the Adaptive read-ahead patches. On-demand readahead reimplements the Linux readahead functionality, removing a lot of complexity from the current system and making it more flexible. This new system maintains the same performance for trivial sequential/random reads, it improves the sysbench/OLTP MySQL benchmark up to 8%, and performance on readahead thrashing gains up to 3 times. There are more read-ahead patches based in this infrastructure pending and further work could be done in this area as well, so expect more improvements in the future. Detailed design document and benchmarks can be found here.

Code: (commit 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14)