[PATCH] Speed up modprobe and MAKEDEV

[Jon Masters]

On Thu, 2008-10-16 at 14:49 +0200, Harald Hoyer wrote:

> modprobe is mostly disk I/O bound, so for benchmarking the disk cache has to be 
> cleared before every run

Nah. We're not making any claims about magically being able to speed up
the reading/module init itself, only the parsing of the meta data. At
udev coldstart time, the (small) files are likely sitting in the page
cache already anyway. I'm not so worried about how long udev/modprobe
takes once you've booted and insert your $whatever_random_device.

Your point is noted, and I will investigate further, but I'm pretty
convinced that we've got a dramatic speedup here either way. I'll be
pushing a 3.6 release ensuring that the binary files have a version
attached so I can make changes to the format in the future and then
fallback to the text versions of those files automatically.

Cheers,

Jon.