Re: noatime support in kernel?

Alan Brown (alan@papaioea.manawatu.gen.nz)
29 Oct 1996 00:15:40 +1300


In article <54r3k4$g02@palladium.transmeta.com>,
H. Peter Anvin <hpa@transmeta.com> wrote:

>Doing this in general breaks UNIX security as we know it, so it
>*definitely* would have to be a filesystem mount option.

The atime patch is implemented as a mount option (no_atime)

The inode patch seems to be also, but its major intended use is to read
files which are globally readable anyway. In most situations, the news
partition (whether a disk or an md array) is on its lonesome anyway, as
that's the only way to get enough speed out of them.

FWIW, my news machine is averaging 5 article writes per second and about 5
times that figure for reads. The atime patch led to a 400% speedup in UUCP
newsbatching on my system, so the 30% being bandied around can be improved
on in some specialised circumstances (presorted batchlist, enough ram to
buffer/cache things, etc)

AB

-- 
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