From: sct@dcs.ed.ac.uk (Stephen Tweedie) Subject: Re: defragger for ext2fs? Date: 2 Apr 1993 00:34:37 GMT
> In article <1993Apr1.042033.10344@r-node.hub.org>, marc@r-node.hub.org (Marc G Fournier) writes:
> | Just curious as to whether there is an upcoming release of a
> | defragger for the ext2 file system? as it uses a different mechanism
> | for keeping track of free blocks and such over the ext file system, I
> | do presume that they are not compatible?
> Actually one of the advantages of the ext2 is that there's a lot less
> need for defragging. That doesn't mean there won't be one some day, but
> you really shouldn't get much fragmentation unless you're doing some
> very odd disk usage.
Yes. Porting the defragmenter is not very high up my list of
priorities for exactly this reason. Incidentally, I would be very
interested to know what kind of performance people are getting with
the new (ext2-0.2d / Linux 0.99pre8 or later) ext2fs allocation code.
If there does prove to be a need for defragmenting, I'll look into it.
Actually, I might get around to it before then; the defragmenter does
major reorganising of disk partitions, which is exactly what is
required to convert extfs or minixfs to ext2fs automatically. It
won't be tomorrow, but it may get done.
By the way, how many people use my defragmenter? Just curious...
Cheers,
Stephen Tweedie.