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https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Systemd#Readahead

systemctl enable systemd-readahead-collect.service systemd-readahead-replay.service

Could it boost the boot speed of the Raspberry Pi? Is the boot speed noticeable? Will it affect the SD card in any way?

ArchHaskeller
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2 Answers2

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I would hazard a no on this. SD cards have low transfer rates and yet reasonable seek times. Read ahead works best when finding data on a medium with a high transfer rate but a slow seek time. Reading more than you absolutely have to from an SD card will always be pretty slow.

scruss
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In this thread, people say that readahead increases performance of sequential reads from the SD card.

This LWN article also suggests that readahead is a key feature to boost boot times, even on very fast media such as SSDs. This is because the normal boot sequence has a lot of "holes" (in term of CPU usage) waiting for things to be ready (just think at udev populating /dev directory, etc.). These "holes" can be used by readahead to prefetch disk sectors that will be used later in the boot sequence, thus skipping blocking I/O requests.

Avio
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