Fast Application Launch on Personal Computing/Communication Devices

Abstract

We present Paralfetch, a novel prefetcher to speed up app launches on personal computing/communication devices by: 1) accurate collection of launch-related disk read requests, 2) pre-scheduling of these requests to improve I/O throughput during prefetching, and 3) overlapping app execution with disk prefetching for hiding disk access time from the app execution. We have implemented Paralfetch under Linux kernels on a desktop/laptop PC, a Raspberry Pi 3 board, and an Android smartphone. Tests with popular apps show that Paralfetch significantly reduces app launch times on flash-based drives, and outperforms GSoC Prefetch and FAST, which are representative app prefetchers available for Linux-based systems. © 2023 by The USENIX Association. All rights reserved.