Advice for hacking on ufs/ffs

[Oliver Fromme]

Rick C. Petty wrote:
 > Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
 > > Rick C. Petty wrote:
 > > > Shane Adams wrote:
 > > > > I used dd to create 1G file.
 > > > A faster way is:
 > > >     touch filename
 > > >     truncate -s 1g filename
 > > 
 > > no, this will result in a fragmented image, which will hurt run-time
 > > performance.

Indeed.

 > Not necessarily.  If you install a variant of windoze, the installer will
 > format the disk first, writing zeros (and metadata) sequentially, and
 > thus the allocation will not be fragmented.

Not true.  Last time I installed Windows, it did not
overwrite the whole disk.  If it did that, it would
have taken _way_ too long (hours instead of minutes).

 > In the case of UFS newfs
 > only the metadata will be written for each cylinder group

No.  Only the superblock copies and block bitmaps are
written during newfs, nothing else.

 > and thus the
 > logical blocks for all metadata will be contiguous.

Nope.  As soon as you start writing to such a file system,
it will start allocating space for inodes, indirect block
lists, directories and file data, which will probably lead
to massive fragmentation.

Best regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme,  secnetix GmbH & Co. KG, Marktplatz 29, 85567 Grafing
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