Hello
At first, I thought that the proposed system call is capable of reading *multiple* small files using a single system call - which would help increase HDD/SSD queue utilization and increase IOPS (I/O operations per second) - but that isn't the case and the proposed system call can read just a single file.
Without the ability to read multiple small files using a single system call, it is impossible to increase IOPS (unless an application is using multiple reader threads or somehow instructs the kernel to prefetch multiple files into memory).
While you are at it, why not also add a readfiles system call to read multiple, presumably small, files? The initial unoptimized implementation of readfiles syscall can simply call readfile sequentially.
Sincerely Jan (atomsymbol)