Re: Cannot mount floppies in Squeeze
On Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 6:48 AM, Roger Leigh <rleigh@codelibre.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 12:57:46PM -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Sun, Jul 17, 2011 at 4:58 AM, Tomas Kral <thomas.kral@email.cz> wrote:
>>
>> May I recommend sidestepping this entirely? Mounted floppy drives have
>> *HORRIBLE* performance.
>
> Huh? A mounted floppy should have vastly superior performance to
> mtools, precisely because it is mounted, and the kernel can do
> proper write caching and lazy flushing of data. In comparison,
> mtools uses the block device directly, and can't do any caching.
> This should result in terrible performance for anything but
> occasional single file transfers, and even then you lose something.
No, directory duplication or access both ways is considerably faster
with mtools as well. Keeping a write-accessible filesystem mounted
makes a lot of assumptions about the ability to do things lke run the
kernel function "stat" and get filesystem information quickly, and is
issuing a lot of unnecesary queries against a very slow hardware when
it is mounted It's really only necesasry occasionally for most floppy
operations, and keeping the filesystem mounted makes incredible user
delays in normal operations.
Try using mtools versus a mounted floppy. I predict that you'll
welcome the time saved, although you might have to change some habits.
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