Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2000 08:50:38 -0800 (PST) From: "Duane H. Hesser" <dhh@androcles.com> To: Dag-Erling Smorgrav <des@ofug.org> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG, Randell Jesup <rjesup@wgate.com>, Marius Bendiksen <mbendiks@eunet.no>, Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>, Cy Schubert - ITSD Open Systems Group <Cy.Schubert@uumail.gov.bc.ca> Subject: Re: Like to commit my diskprep Message-ID: <XFMail.001103085038.dhh@androcles.com> In-Reply-To: <xzpofzxjek6.fsf@flood.ping.uio.no>
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On 03-Nov-00 Dag-Erling Smorgrav wrote: ... > > Certainly, but I believe these defaults were chosen nearly ten years > ago (if not more) on hardware which we today charitably describe as > "antiquated" :) > > DES > -- > Dag-Erling Smorgrav - des@ofug.org ... You are too optimistic, when you say "nearly ten years". McKusick, et al's paper "A Fast Filesystem for Unix", which describes the design of the 4.2BSD FFS, and some of the testing upon which it was based, is marked as "Revised July 27, 1983" in my copy of the 4.2BSD manuals printed by Usenix for 4.2BSD. The copy in /usr/share/doc/smm/05.fastfs/ is "Revised February 18, 1984". How time flies when you're having fun. From the paper, disk tests were done on a Vax 750 with Unibus and Massbus controllers and an "Ampex Capricorn 330 Megabyte Winchester disk", with a "bandwidth" on the order of 500 KB/sec. "Antiquated" may be a fair description. That was a big disk in those days, an 8K blocksize gave an order of magnitude transfer speed improvement over a 1K blocksize filesystem, and used almost all of the cpu (with a Unibus controller). No "smart" disks, remember. I don't recall even seeing test results for 16K or larger, and certainly 8K was the largest size which could be configured in 4.2BSD. Perhaps it *is* time to rethink defaults. Proabably should be done at least once every millenium. -------------- Duane H. Hesser dhh@androcles.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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