Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Fri, 26 Oct 2001 20:21:29 +0200
From:      Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@critter.freebsd.dk>
To:        Alfred Perlstein <bright@mu.org>
Cc:        Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org>, Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com>, Peter Wemm <peter@wemm.org>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: 64 bit times revisited.. 
Message-ID:  <5201.1004120489@critter.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 26 Oct 2001 12:35:26 CDT." <20011026123526.F15052@elvis.mu.org> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <20011026123526.F15052@elvis.mu.org>, Alfred Perlstein writes:

>> Because applications in core write files on disk ?  :-)
>
>Excuse me for being daft, but isn't some of the resolution currently
>in the on-disk portion more than the time it takes to write and
>re-read the data from most media?  Are you concerned with faster
>media?  Perhaps MFS?

Not all filesystems are backed by disk, some (like DEVFS) have no
physical backing at all.

Second, with softupdates, even physically backed disks are not
constrained to a physical movement for each transaction.

Third, I want people to consider for a moment what the world looked
like 10 years ago.  Now who here dare predict if we will need or
not need nanosecond (or better) resolution for timestamps 10 years
down the road ?

After all, PC cpu clock frequencies have only increased by a factor
42[*] or so in the last 10 years...

Ten years down the road, people might curse us for wasting two bits
which could have split the nanoseconds to solve a problem which is
by then still 27 years down the road...

So what I'm advocating is to discuss this with Kirk for his FFS2 layout,
and realize that very few of the media which holds todays filesystems
will still be rotating 10 years from now.

I do, by the way, find it much more interesting to discuss if future
inodes should contain counters counting number of R/O opens, number
of R/W opens, number of sectors written etc etc.  Such statistics could
be used to optimize layout based on actual statistics, rather than
statistical guesswork as we do now...

Poul-Henning

[*] 1400MHz / 33 MHz = 42.4242424242, there is probably no cosmic
significance in this numer.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?5201.1004120489>