Messages in this thread |  | | From | Nick LeRoy <> | Subject | Re: Poor floppy performance in kernel 2.4.10 | Date | Thu, 18 Oct 2001 15:47:15 -0500 |
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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.
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