Reducing the size of the ports tree (brainstorm v2)

[Warren Block]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2014, Chris H wrote:

> On Tue, 4 Nov 2014 16:16:09 -0700 (MST) Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote
>
>> On Tue, 4 Nov 2014, Chris H wrote:
>>
>>> gpart(8) -a gives you what you need. If it's truly as bad as all that,
>>> mounting the ports tree on a 512k aligned slice will reduce the "slack"
>>> you appear to be referring to. zfs(8) also has this ability.
>>
>> Not alignment, but filesystem block size.  But that can only be set for
>> an entire filesystem, and it's a tradeoff.
>
> Quite true. Which was meant to be my point.
> Meaning that the ports tree could then be mounted where ever was
> deemed convenient, and wouldn't carry the "slack" it does on a
> 4k boundary. Maybe even on a removable SSD?

I thought that block suballocation was a thing on most modern 
filesystems.  There would still be an extra seek or several to locate 
the small sub-blocks inside a full block, but it should make space usage 
with small files more efficient.  But I don't know what either UFS or 
ZFS does for that.