I think this is a result of the "blockdev in pagecache" change added in
2.4.10. One of the byproducts of this change is that if a block device
is closed (no other openers) then all of the pages from this device are
dropped from the cache. In the case of a floppy drive, this is very
important, as you don't want to be cacheing data from one floppy after
you have inserted a new floppy.
In contrast, if you mounted the floppy instead of using mtools, it would
probably have good performance for small files as well.
Cheers, Andreas
-- Andreas Dilger \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto, \ would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?" http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/ -- Dogbert- 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/