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Date:      Mon, 5 Feb 1996 13:31:54 -0700 (MST)
From:      Terry Lambert <terry@lambert.org>
To:        luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it (Luigi Rizzo)
Cc:        bde@zeta.org.au, hackers@FreeBSD.org, rnordier@iafrica.com
Subject:   Re: FAT filesystem performance
Message-ID:  <199602052031.NAA15459@phaeton.artisoft.com>
In-Reply-To: <199602050837.JAA20312@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> from "Luigi Rizzo" at Feb 5, 96 09:37:21 am

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> > 128K is quite small now, but it still isn't necessary to lock it into
> > memory.  Caching it in a normal LRU way should work reasonably well.
> > Perhaps FAT buffers should have a higher priority than other buffers
> > for msdosfs, but they probably shouldn't have higher priority than
> > buffers for other file systems.
> 
> agreed. That's why I thought not to develop a special purpose caching
> policy and try to rely on what is already available. Especally in
> FreeBSD, where the FS & VM caches are merged, and the system should be
> quite flexible.

The problem with doing this is the mmap problem.

That is, buffers are cached on the basis of vnode + offset instead of
device + offset.

Basically, this means that when you recycle vnodes, you must invalidate
perfectly good data in the cache because there is no longer a vnode to
point to it.

This is critically bogus, IMO (do a find from / and listen to the
"tick tick tick..." of the disk on a 16M machine, knowing less than
8M of blocks are being accessed, and the noise is unnecessary disk
access from vnode recycling -- now you know why I wanted to move the
VOP_LOCK code out of the per-FS and why I think dissociating a vnode
with a seperate ihashget in ufs is >*BOGUS*<).


					Terry Lambert
					terry@lambert.org
---
Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present
or previous employers.



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