Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com> said:
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2000 at 05:42:25PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > Yes, for a good reason: performance.
> Performance of what? I'm not asking for a cache flush, I'm just
> asking for write(/dev/hda1) being identical (would it be working or
> non-working) to write(/dev/hda+appropriate sector offset). Nothing
> more, nothing less. This has nothing to do with whether there is a
> mounted filesystem in the given partition. It is only the presence of
> the mounted filesystem shows the difference.
This means the mounted filesystem has to have mechanisms to check if
something has been changed beneath it, the block device drivers have to
agree on using the same buffer cache (or keeping them in sync), etc. Bloat
and performance loss for something that is done once in a blue moon (you
aren't installing new kernels several times per second, are you?). In this
case, making life a bit more difficult for writers of bootloaders for the
sake of making the rest go fast is entirely justified.
-- Dr. Horst H. von Brand mailto:vonbrand@inf.utfsm.cl Departamento de Informatica Fono: +56 32 654431 Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria +56 32 654239 Casilla 110-V, Valparaiso, Chile Fax: +56 32 797513- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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