Re: SEUL: Re: Trial or no trial

[Thomas Molesworth <thomas@bass.almac.co.uk>]

On Tue, 1 Jul 1997, Erik Walthinsen wrote:

> Of course for those with plenty of proc power, source patches are the way to 
> go.

Yes! Source patches would work - I forgot about that.

> > I'll post a report on the performance issues, but I agree that it doesn't
> > help to have Linux relying on MS. It might be possible to adjust the
> > partition table around the loopback file; any suggestions?
> The partition table wouldn't change, but we would want to keep the loopback 
> file contiguous.  That's a trick in itself, and still doesn't give us 
> wonderful performance.  That's one of the reasons I say op off the live CD: 
> better read performance for RO files, which constitutes most of the system 
> anyway.

But the live CD needs to have a RW filesystem somewhere anyway, what
type would this be? Once a file is contiguous anyway, it doesn't get
fragmented unless more clusters are allocated. If the loopback system is a
fixed size (a requirement for ext2), there shouldn't be a problem. By
adjusting the partition table around the file, I mean that the file could be
moved to the end of the disk, and transformed into an ext2 partition if
necessary.

> Rauli Ruohonen <raulir@fishy.pp.sci.fi> asked this in linux-kernel about a 
> week ago: (COW = copy-on-write)
> 
> RR> Would it be possible to have COW hardlinks for 2.2?
> RR> It would surely be nice, imagine hard linking everything in the source 
> RR> tree, and when you make modifications the originals won't be changed.
> RR> Lots of saved space :)
> 
> No response.  However, his query was relative to kernel source trees.  In the 
> case of syslog.conf, /var/log/*, etc., we're dealing either with small enough 
> files or files that start out a 0 size anyway, so it probably would be a waste 
> to get someone (Linus) to do COW files.

I imagine SEUL will have a list of which files are config files, which are
binaries, etc, so this won't be too much of a problem.

--
Thomas Molesworth            (thomas@bass.almac.co.uk)

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