Since kernel 2.4.10, I observe a rather poor performance of the good old
floppy drive. It used to work find in kernel 2.4.9. Kernel 2.4.10 broke
it, and 2.4.12 did not fix it. I access my floppy using mtools-3.9.7-4 as
found in RH 7.1.
Not knowing anything about the kernel internals, I would say that the
floppy driver does not do any caching anymore. With kernel 2.4.9, "mdir"
of a standard 1.44 MB, completely empty floppy disk takes about 1 second
for the first invocation, and next to nothing for the subsequent ones.
>From 2.4.10 on, it takes over 2 seconds every time. Writing a 30 KB file
with 2.4.9 takes below 3 seconds, with >=2.4.10 it's over 6 seconds.
Maybe I should just keep quiet and be happy that it works at all, after
all floppies are rarely used nowadays, but letting such a performance
degradation go unreported is just beyond me :-).
Regards,
-- Kamil Iskra http://www.science.uva.nl/~kamil/ Section Computational Science, Faculty of Science, Universiteit van Amsterdam kamil@science.uva.nl tel. +31 20 525 75 35 fax. +31 20 525 74 90 Kruislaan 403 room F.202 1098 SJ Amsterdam The Netherlands- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/