Re: atomicity

[Mirian Crzig Lennox]

[e-mail] (Alan Cox) writes:
> >
> > not useful anymore.  With modern disks, chances are excellent that the
> > specific 3D geometry the file system sees is an utter fiction, and
> > that cylinder locality is thus more-or-less a meaningless concept.
> 
> If it was meaningless then things like sorting write queues would also
> be pointless. Its certainly true that the 3D information is less than
> useful nowdays. Its not however true that relative distance (in time)
> between sectors is not strongly proportional to the difference in sector
> numbers, or that reading sectors is order of sequentional logical number
> isnt a good thing

Aha!  I think I get it.

Even though cyl groups are a fiction, they're no worse than any other
arbitrary grouping of sectors, so why not use them and let the disk
controller hardware do the maths instead of the kernel.  Clever.

-- 
Mirian Crzig Lennox                                Systems Anarchist
          "There's a New World Order coming every minute.
                      Make mine extra cheese."