From owner-freebsd-arch Wed Oct 13 20:16:22 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from ns1.yes.no (ns1.yes.no [195.204.136.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7D8FE14F07 for ; Wed, 13 Oct 1999 20:16:19 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from eivind@bitbox.follo.net) Received: from bitbox.follo.net (bitbox.follo.net [195.204.143.218]) by ns1.yes.no (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id FAA00685 for ; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 05:16:18 +0200 (CEST) Received: (from eivind@localhost) by bitbox.follo.net (8.8.8/8.8.6) id FAA40178 for freebsd-arch@freebsd.org; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 05:16:18 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from mailman.zeta.org.au (mailman.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.16]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 90F4014F07 for ; Wed, 13 Oct 1999 20:16:07 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from bde@zeta.org.au) Received: from d154.syd2.zeta.org.au (beefcake.zeta.org.au [203.26.10.12]) by mailman.zeta.org.au (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id NAA29042; Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:18:11 +1000 Date: Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:15:25 +1000 (EST) From: Bruce Evans X-Sender: bde@alphplex.bde.org To: Kirk McKusick Cc: Julian Elischer , freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The eventual fate of BLOCK devices. In-Reply-To: <199910131738.KAA18428@flamingo.McKusick.COM> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Kirk McKusick wrote: > If no one on the list can think of any use, I doubt that there is one. I routinely use Linux fsck.ext2 and mkfs.ext2 to develop ext2fs under FreeBSD. These (at least the May 1997 versions) depend on the system for sub-block i/o's. savecore depended on the system for sub-block i/o's until recently. It needs to read the dumpmag word and related things, and doing its own blocking just for this is unnecessarily difficult. > Just because there might some day be a use is not enough reason to have > an interface. BSD has stayed lean and mean (relative to the commercial > Unix varients) by actively throwing out decrepit interfaces. If we revert FreeBSD hasn't been so successful in avoiding bloat. The text size of a (sub) minimal kernel with no options or devices has increased from 275K in FreeBSD-1.1.5 to 500K in FreeBSD-3.3 and 550K in FreeBSD-current. The size of sys/kern has increased from 822 blocks in FreeBSD-1.1.5 to 780 blocks in Lite2, 1719 blocks in FreeBSD-3.3 and 1812 blocks in FreeBSD-current. Bruce To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message