Re: Poor floppy performance in kernel 2.4.10

Nick LeRoy (nleroy@cs.wisc.edu)
Thu, 18 Oct 2001 15:47:15 -0500


On Thursday 18 October 2001 14:57, bill davidsen wrote:
> In article <200110181632.f9IGW9i29729@schroeder.cs.wisc.edu>
nleroy@cs.wisc.edu wrote:
> | Perhaps there should be a pair of "mtools" added: mopen and mclose, that
> | do basically this. That way it could be a "standard" item, documented in
> | man pages, etc., not some secret that only the l-k users know. Thoughts?
>
> At the risk of seeming ungenerous, mtools was a hack, to compensate
> for the inability of some operating systems to handle the DOS
> filesystem. While it's useful, I don't thing blindingly fast performance
> is a requirement.

Yeah, but they're still handy from time to time. It's certainly quicker to
pop a disk in and type "mdir", than to put it in, type "mount /floppy; ls
/floppy; umount /floppy" or similar. You get the picture. Not that you
don't have a valid point, too.

> That said, I have a few other thoughts. First, can't the kernel
> detect when a new floppy is inserted? I can't remember if there is an
> interupt generated when the floppy seats or not.

If I'm not mistaken, and I think has already been mentioned somewhere before
in this thread, these interrupts where determined to be unreliable under some
circumstances. Anybody remember the details?

> And second, can't you just avoid the whole issue by keeping the floppy
> accessed at all time while you use it? Something like:
> sleep 3600 </dev/fd0 &
> or some such to lock the pages after they are read?

That's basically what I'd propose "mopen" do... Hold it open 'til the user
does a "mclose". Of course, if you yank the disk out in the middle, all bets
are off.

-Nick
-
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/