I wonder if it is possible (currently or in the future as an RFE) to tell ZFS to automatically read-ahead some files and cache them in RAM and/or L2ARC?
One use-case would be for Home-NAS setups where multimedia (video files or catalogs of images/music) are viewed form a ZFS box. For example, if a user wants to watch a film, or listen to a playlist of MP3's, or push photos to a wall display (photo frame, etc.), the storage box "should" read-ahead all required data from HDDs and save it in ARC/L2ARC. Then the HDDs can spin down for hours while the pre-fetched gigabytes of data are used by consumers from the cache. End-users get peace, quiet and less electricity used while they enjoy their multimedia entertainment ;) Is it possible? If not, how hard would it be to implement? In terms of scripting, would it suffice to detect reads (i.e. with DTrace) and read the files to /dev/null to get them cached along with all required metadata (so that mechanical HDDs are not required for reads afterwards)? Thanks, //Jim Klimov _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
