From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Apr 6 12:09:52 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id MAA26898 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 6 Apr 1997 12:09:52 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.50]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id MAA26893 for ; Sun, 6 Apr 1997 12:09:49 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA28481; Sun, 6 Apr 1997 11:50:50 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199704061850.LAA28481@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Better late than never... The FreeBSD News! To: adrian@obiwan.aceonline.com.au (Adrian Chadd) Date: Sun, 6 Apr 1997 11:50:50 -0700 (MST) Cc: fullermd@narcissus.ml.org, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Adrian Chadd" at Apr 6, 97 04:06:39 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > There are some other (interesting) hacks, eg a patch that (with the right > mount option) lets you reference files / directories directly by inode > number, speeding up programs like INN and Squid by heaps. > > Does anyone know of anything in FreeBSD like this? Yes. At one point in time I implemented a name-space escape to do this sort of "open by inode" using the "\\" POSIX name space escape sequence. It's pretty trivial to do. I also modified the ioctl() to propagate down to the FS level (it's stupidly assumed that an ioctl() can only apply to a device, not a file, even though there is an op). It took an ino_t argument and operated on an fd that was open on the FS which you wanted the lookup on, and it returned an fd for the inode in the per process open file table. This second was hugely faster (I actually used it to speed up SAMBA and CAP significantly), but requires that you change the internal handling of open file instances so that they can be generated within a file system (ie: basically the vnode instance/system open file table changes I have been proposing). > Something you should say in the Linux vs. FreeBSD is the way that the two > systems are implemented, ie there isn't "The Linux Distribution" unlike > FreeBSD, in Linux ideas flow much more freely and .. well .. I've seen > some cool ideas implemented by ugly code. :) > > I'll start on it tonight, and put it up on a webpage for people to see. Make sure you also reference DOS emulation, VM86() support, and kernel module implementations, as well as adherence to ABI standards and object file format standards, 802.3 LLP support, and platforms other than Intel (I hear Linux SMP now runs on SPARC hardware). 8-|. Regards, Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.