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Date:      Thu, 14 Oct 1999 13:15:25 +1000 (EST)
From:      Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
To:        Kirk McKusick <mckusick@flamingo.McKusick.COM>
Cc:        Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: The eventual fate of BLOCK devices. 
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910141222290.32868-100000@alphplex.bde.org>
In-Reply-To: <199910131738.KAA18428@flamingo.McKusick.COM>

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On Wed, 13 Oct 1999, Kirk McKusick wrote:

> If no one on the list can think of any use, I doubt that there is one.

I routinely use Linux fsck.ext2 and mkfs.ext2 to develop ext2fs under
FreeBSD.  These (at least the May 1997 versions) depend on the system for
sub-block i/o's.

savecore depended on the system for sub-block i/o's until recently.  It
needs to read the dumpmag word and related things, and doing its own
blocking just for this is unnecessarily difficult.

> Just because there might some day be a use is not enough reason to have
> an interface. BSD has stayed lean and mean (relative to the commercial
> Unix varients) by actively throwing out decrepit interfaces. If we revert

FreeBSD hasn't been so successful in avoiding bloat.  The text size of a
(sub) minimal kernel with no options or devices has increased from 275K
in FreeBSD-1.1.5 to 500K in FreeBSD-3.3 and 550K in FreeBSD-current.  The
size of sys/kern has increased from 822 blocks in FreeBSD-1.1.5 to 780
blocks in Lite2, 1719 blocks in FreeBSD-3.3 and 1812 blocks in
FreeBSD-current.

Bruce





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