Re: Why minix for root.bin?
On Tue, Apr 06, 1999 at 01:22:57PM +0200, Hartmut Koptein wrote:
> > No, ROM-FS, a specially designed filesystem that is as compact as possible,
> > in kernel code as well as on disk. It was made for use in boot disks etc.
>
> For comparison, both the older minix and xiafs (the latter is now
> defunct) filesystems, compiled as module need more than 20000 bytes,
> while romfs is less than a page, about 4000 bytes (assuming i586
> code). Under the same conditions, the msdos filesystem would need
> about 30K (and does not support device nodes or symlinks), while the
> nfs module with nfsroot is about 57K. Furthermore, as a bit unfair
> comparison, an actual rescue disk used up 3202 blocks with ext2, while
> with romfs, it needed 3079 blocks.
Additionally, here you have additional statistics (using the root.bin
found in boot floppies 2.1.9-1999-03-03):
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1843200 Apr 7 16:53 root.bin.minix
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 702662 Apr 7 16:57 root.bin.minix.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1843200 Apr 7 16:56 root.bin.ext2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 704508 Apr 7 16:58 root.bin.ext2.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1575936 Apr 7 16:58 root.bin.romfs
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 701629 Apr 7 16:58 root.bin.romfs.gz
Filesystem 1024-blocks Used Available Capacity Mounted on
/tmp/root.bin.minix 1769 1609 160 91% /mnt
/tmp/root.bin.ext2 1738 1606 42 97% /mnt2
/tmp/root.bin.romfs 1539 1539 0 100% /mnt3
If we use ROMFS, we need to make another filesystem in RAM to store
temp files, etc.
I'm a great defensor of ROMFS (I'm the genromfs maintainer :)) but I
think we should move to ext2. The space used in the filesystem isn't
very large, and we could avoid having the kernel with MINIX builtin.
--
Juan Cespedes
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