"readahead" is the term used to refer to a tool that preloads files in this case used during the boot process to make the system boot faster.

this implementation of the tool provides the following features:
* it can take multiple lists of files to be preloaded, and sort them
according to their position on the disk.
* it preloads the inode tables on ext2-based file systems.
* it opens the files without making the system update their access
time, therefore avoiding extra disk writes.
* it uses a lightweight monitoring daemon.