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A set of processes may happen  to  perform interleaved reads, i.e.,requests
whose union would give rise to a  sequential read  pattern.  There are two
typical  cases: in the first  case,   processes  read  fixed-size chunks of
data at a fixed distance from each other, while in the second case processes
may read variable-size chunks at  variable distances. The latter case occurs
for  example with  QEMU, which  splits the  I/O generated  by the  guest into
multiple chunks,  and lets these chunks  be served by a  pool of cooperating
processes,  iteratively  assigning  the  next  chunk of  I/O  to  the first
available  process. CFQ  uses actual  queue merging  for the  first type of
rocesses, whereas it  uses preemption to get a sequential  read pattern out
of the read requests  performed by the second type of  processes. In the end
it uses  two different  mechanisms to  achieve the  same goal: boosting the
throughput with interleaved I/O.

This pa...