Re: [PATCH] Use FIBMAP to sort .list files before scanning
* Morten Hustveit:
> I haven't tried this, because it would require much more changes to
> the dpkg code. The "FIBMAP every .list file" step takes less than
> one second when operating from a cold disk cache, probably because
> inodes aren't as scattered as file contents.
Very interesting. It turns out that I was wrong. For really old
directories, sorting by inode number (obtained through readdir without
a separate stat call) does not really speed things up that much.
Sorting by block number is measurably faster. Sorting by inode number
before determining the block number achieves only a minor additional
gain over using block numbers.
FIBMAP has one problem: it's potentially unsafe and it's guarded with
CAP_SYS_RAWIO. FIEMAP doesn't require CAP_SYS_RAWIO, so it *should*
be safe, but the lack of the capapability check might be an oversight.
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