(In response to my own post, here)

I tried out sReadahead this morning. That experience was very disappointing initial testing. I will describe the process here:

1. Download the source, from moblin.org and compile it.
2. Install readahead-list, created by our own Robbat2
3. Use the file lists from readahead-list and pass it to sreadahead’s generate_fileset command
   cd /etc ; generate_filelist /etc/readahead-list/runlevel-boot
   (I actually tried to concatenate both runlevel-boot and runlevel-default with no additional results.)
4. Shove sreadahead in the readahead-list init scripts
5. reboot

End result: No improvement in boot time with either readahead-list or sReadahead.
Disclaimer: This was a naive attempt and I’m sure I need additional kernel patches or something. But that is non obvious to me at this point. Anyway, if others want to expand on this…feel free to contact me.

Additional reading:
Improving boot time on a general Linux distribution, not an easy task (Mandriva dev)
LWN’s response to above post.