Modified floppy server

Hi All,

I've just finished some modifications to the floppy server to make it do
look-ahead sector caching on reads (writes still go direct to keep things
safe). If anyone's using the current code and wouldn't mind running the new
stuff for a while please let me know.

Running the following command form:

        dd if=/dev/fd/fd0 bs=xxxx > /dev/null

and timing the results showed the following (on a 1.44 MByte floppy):

                old (dx-33) new (dx-33) linux-1.1.58 (dx/2-66)

bs=512 610 seconds 71 seconds 51 seconds
bs=18432 56 seconds 56 seconds 51 seconds

I put in the results for my Linux system doing the same test for comparison
(my Linux box is a dx/2-66 with 256k cache though whereas my VSTa system is
a dx-33 with no L2 cache).

Running a boot floppy with the new code seems to have everything running
about 200-300% faster under a dos fs.

FWIW I believe that the difference between the 71 second and the 56 second
results is down to the overhead of an extra 35 requests per track (2880
requests as opposed to just 80).

                        Regards,
                        Dave
Received on Thu Oct 27 16:53:32 1994