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Date:      03 Nov 2000 11:57:58 -0500
From:      Randell Jesup <rjesup@wgate.com>
To:        Marius Bendiksen <mbendiks@eunet.no>
Cc:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@wintelcom.net>, Matt Dillon <dillon@earth.backplane.com>, Randell Jesup <rjesup@wgate.com>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Like to commit my diskprep
Message-ID:  <ybulmv1802x.fsf@jesup.eng.tvol.net.jesup.eng.tvol.net>
In-Reply-To: Marius Bendiksen's message of "Thu, 2 Nov 2000 23:29:03 %2B0100 (CET)"
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.05.10011022322581.13327-100000@login-1.eunet.no>

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Marius Bendiksen <mbendiks@eunet.no> writes:
>Actually, block indirection could be fixed by raping the code to support
>the notion of extents. As to allocating in the general locality of the
>inode or datablock, that would require you to be within a distance of 1
>track, and on a system with better things to spend its cache on than
>indirect blocks, you'll lose some when you hit double or triple indirect,
>especially with random access.

        1 track?  Not really.  Modern drives have internal caches and
generally aggressively read-ahead.  There was an interesting paper in
SIGOS (I think) around a year ago about inode locality, forward placement,
and storing small files in the inode, and how all of this interacted
with modern drives.  Also, what is a "track" on a modern drive?  ;-)

>As a side note, I've thought about abusing the actual inodes themselves to
>hold single indirect blocks. Opinions, apart from the general evilness of
>abusing the structures in such a fashion?

        That sounds good.

>> Yes, patches would be nice. :)
>
>Patches cannot be formed until a general consensus exists on how the
>patches should do things if and when an enterprising soul made them.
>Otherwise, they stand a good chance at being rejected based on some,
>possibly relevant, objection to how they work.
>
>Also, such patches are likely best formed by the same people that are
>currently suggesting doing a variety of other things for disklabel and
>friends.

        I'm willing to help on this, though my time may be limited.  I have
_extensive_ FS experience from my Amiga days, and also was the primary
disk-driver person and SCSI expert, and also did "archive" filesystems for
Scala.  I've never hacked the internals of ufs, however, but I do know the
issues.

-- 
Randell Jesup, Worldgate Communications, ex-Scala, ex-Amiga OS team ('88-94)
rjesup@wgate.com



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