From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds) Subject: Re: Floppies (was Re: File system issues!) Date: 15 Jul 1992 18:00:04 GMT
In article <1992Jul14.150258.29853@hubcap.clemson.edu> dawill@hubcap.clemson.edu (david williams) writes:
>
> I'll say one thing for the floppy driver - it's much faster than the
>MS_DOG floppy. I was exceeding pissed at my 386 floppy performance,
>and had pretty much given up on my controller as the problem. Not so!
>Running floppy I/O under Linux is a breath of fresh air, so it's not my
>hardware... It's a problem with MS_LOSS. Once more, proof that Linux
>is a really nice system.
This is due to the track-buffering: linux is pretty good at reading
sequential data (as in tar-files etc), but performance isn't that good
if you use the floppy for a filesystem (although the buffer cache does
help in that case).
> Anybody have an idea why MS-DOG is so slow in comparison with Linux
>if the floppy drivers for Linux are in such a sad state?
It's not that the driver isn't good: the linux drivers work pretty well
(with the exception of some problems), and they do a lot of smart
things: it's just that the actual code to do it isn't pretty. That
means potential bugs are hard to find, but it doesn't necessarily mean
the driver is slow. I'd like to start over on a clean slate, but it's
hard to find the energy when the current driver works as well as it
does.
Linus