# Storage Prefetching

Linux readahead infers the next page from recent file offsets, which fails when accesses follow workload structure such as sparse startup reads, B-tree key-order traversal, or tensor-layout model loading. PredictIO separates prediction from execution: the kernel delivers observed accesses and application hints to user-space policies, which emit uniform page-range requests that a kernel backend validates, bounds, and issues as asynchronous prefetch I/O. Across application launch, SQLite range scans, and llama.cpp model loading, latency drops by 5.3–26.3%, scans speed up by up to 2.99, and model loading drops by 8.8–47.9%.

Linux readahead infers the next page from recent file offsets, which fails when accesses follow workload structure such as sparse startup reads, B-tree key-order traversal, or tensor-layout model loading. PredictIO separates prediction from execution: the kernel delivers observed accesses and application hints to user-space policies, which emit uniform page-range requests that a kernel backend validates, bounds, and issues as asynchronous prefetch I/O. Across application launch, SQLite range scans, and llama.cpp model loading, latency drops by 5.3–26.3%, scans speed up by up to 2.99, and model loading drops by 8.8–47.9%.