Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:22:02 -0800
From:      Artem Belevich <art@freebsd.org>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
Cc:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org, =?ISO-8859-2?Q?Edward_Tomasz_Napiera=B3a?= <trasz@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Speeding up the loader(8).
Message-ID:  <CAFqOu6jRtqNrwJ%2B%2BVDgDtC22CXt-5v8W4h26Y6h43FkWg=nKPw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201201260954.23179.jhb@freebsd.org>
References:  <20120123215503.GA64787@geosci> <CAFqOu6ivT34T_RGHxuWZOTk2mCJ29P6wLY3RHt7=S-wH-Y0eYg@mail.gmail.com> <201201260954.23179.jhb@freebsd.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 6:54 AM, John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> wrote:
>> > 3. The code in bcache.c doesn't really implement an LRU - it implement=
s
>> > =A0 'least recently added' algorithm, i.e. a kind of queue. =A0Not tha=
t
>> > =A0 it matters much, since it flushes the elements two seconds after
>> > =A0 caching them anyway. =A0I replaced it with Least Frequently Used.
>> > =A0 LRU didn't behave well, as it tended to replace metadata with data
>> > =A0 used only once.
>
> These sound reasonable, though I suspect they are in part due to dealing =
with
> floppies where the user can swap out of the disk and we have no way of
> noticing otherwise. =A0However, we could possibly adjust some behavior to=
 cache
> the bits if the disk is not a floppy drive.
>
>> 4. it flushes cache on access to a different drive which means that
>> cache does not help on multi-disk ZFS setups.
>
> I believe this is also necessary to deal with floppies and the fact that =
you
> don't have a reliable way of knowing if a floppy has changed.

Are floppies still relevant?

When I attempted to address your concern about floppies that you
raised when I've sent my patch, I've discovered that there's no floppy
connector on any of the computers/motherboards that I have.

Few years back I was amused by an Intel motherboard that came with a
floppy disk with RAID drivers on it, but which had no floppy connector
on the motherboard.

In any case, it's easy enough to enforce old behavior for floppy
drives. I will make required changes but I will not be able to test it
due to lack of floppy drives.

--Artem



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?CAFqOu6jRtqNrwJ%2B%2BVDgDtC22CXt-5v8W4h26Y6h43FkWg=nKPw>