[archivator]

Except that's not how class linking works on Android :)

In particular, everything is compiled down to lookup tables and hash tables within each odex/oat. Your point still stands but the hit is much lower than you would think and given the slow speed of the superfluous reads, it ends up being a net positive for A LOT of cases.

[cbsmith]

Well, during verification, you very much do a linear scan as I described. Of course, you only verify once, so that minimizes that use case.

The way odex files are structured, there is actually a fair bit of data sequentially organized (for example dependencies), even with the indexing. The odex format does seem to have some elements that anticipate read-ahead (e.g.: those hash tables, dependencies...).

That said, there is a real question about proper tuning of read-ahead for flash memory (like, perhaps 4k or even 0-byte read-ahead is the right thing to do in general ;-). It's not like it is hard to abuse it.