Re: `filetype' ext2 feature causes dump to SEGV

Doug McNaught (doug@mcnaught.org)
17 Nov 1999 19:16:09 -0500


Stelian Pop <pop@cybercable.fr> writes:

> I was wondering why dump uses
> direct disc access (open and read directly the direct, indirect and
> doubly indirect blocks), instead of using the associated e2fsprogs
> library functions. Did Rémy done this because the functions didn't
> exist at this time or was this for performance reasons ?

I think it was because Linux dump was (more or less) a port from the
Berkeley FFS equivalent, which did this (and furthermore, did it to
the raw device, so dumping a non-quiescent filesystem was guaranteed
to be trouble). I'm pretty sure the BSD version did it for (a)
performance, and (b) so it could easily keep track of inode
information to make incremental restores easier (not that you couldn't
do it with stat(), but that's yet another syscall to slow things
down).

-Doug

-- 
Doug McNaught       doug@mcnaught.org     http://www.mcnaught.org/~doug

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