From owner-freebsd-fs  Mon Aug 26 02:20:07 1996
Return-Path: owner-fs
Received: (from root@localhost)
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id CAA29099
          for fs-outgoing; Mon, 26 Aug 1996 02:20:07 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from eins.siemens.at (eins.siemens.at [193.81.246.11])
          by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA29011;
          Mon, 26 Aug 1996 02:19:54 -0700 (PDT)
Received: from sol1.gud.siemens.co.at (root@firix [10.1.143.100]) by eins.siemens.at (8.7.4/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA27206; Mon, 26 Aug 1996 11:17:57 +0200 (MET DST)
Received: from ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at by sol1.gud.siemens.co.at with smtp
	(Smail3.1.28.1 #7 for <freebsd-fs@freebsd.org>) 
	id m0uuxnu-00021iC; Mon, 26 Aug 96 11:17 MET DST
Received: by ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at (1.37.109.16/1.37)
	id AA242520847; Mon, 26 Aug 1996 11:14:07 +0200
From: "Hr.Ladavac" <lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at>
Message-Id: <199608260914.AA242520847@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at>
Subject: Re: The VIVA file system (fwd)
To: sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au (Stephen Hocking)
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 1996 11:14:07 +0200 (MESZ)
Cc: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org, current@freebsd.org
In-Reply-To: <199608250335.DAA21536@netfl15a.devetir.qld.gov.au> from "Stephen Hocking" at Aug 25, 96 03:35:19 am
X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a]
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Sender: owner-fs@freebsd.org
X-Loop: FreeBSD.org
Precedence: bulk

E-mail message from Stephen Hocking contained:
Anybody have opinions on this vs LFS? Are we still waiting for the Lite-2
stuff, before LFS can go in?

> The package contains a paper on VIVA by its developers, Eric H. Herrin
> II
> and Raphael A. Finkel, and a report on implementing VIVA in Linux by
> Shankar Pasupathy. A brief description of VIVA follows.
> 
> The VIVA filesystem was designed to minimize the time taken for file
> operations. VIVA achieves this goal by using an allocation policy that
> clusters sequentially accessed disk blocks so that disk-head movement
> is minimized. VIVA also uses this clustering to compress block addresses
> in an inode from 32 bits to 1 bit,  relative to traditional filesystems.
> This compression allows us to access about 800KB of data without using
> indirect blocks. Benchmark results of our implementation of VIVA in the
> Linux kernel show that it is much faster than Ext2, the default Linux
> filesystem, for common file operations.
> 
> The Linux implementation of VIVA is a "work in progress".  It does not
> yet handle partitions larger than 64M (so that the allocation bitmap
> fits readily in memory).  Individual files are limited to about 8M
> (inodes currently have only a single indirect block).  There are no
> fragments; block size is restricted to 1K.  (Adding logical blocks of
> larger size will relieve some of these limitations.)

Sounds sort of like clustering FFS if I'm reading this correctly.  Okay,
with a lessened need for indirect blocks, but with a typical unix file
length distribution, I don't think they gain overmuch.

/Marino
> 
> Shankar Pasupathy
> (shankar@pop.uky.edu)
> 
> 
>