Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/888715/

The readahead code in the Linux kernel is nominally responsible for
reading data that has not yet been explicitly requested from storage,
with the idea that it might be needed soon. The code is stable, functional, widely
used, and uncontroversial, so it is reasonable to expect the code to be of
high quality, and largely this is true. Recently, I found the need to
document this code, which naturally shone a rather different light on
it. This work revealed minor problems with functionality and significant
problems with naming.