Optimizing code via compiler flags
a patch for the Linux kernel to use SSDs to cache other block devices
Felix von Leitner's original paper on BSD and Linux io performance.
Many readers will have heard about Arjan van de Ven and Auke Kok's work to boot an ASUS Eee 901 in 5 seconds. Inspired by this work, and because I have the same laptop, I decided to try to reproduce their results. So far I have not come very close to their 5 seconds, but I have made some significant improvements compared to the default boot time for Debian on that machine; this article describes what I've done.