Re: speedup device flushing with devfs

[David Schweikert]

On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 10:06:53 +1100, Andrew Clausen wrote:
> > I made a strace and I did see that parted does try to open
> > part1, part2, ... part15, in that directory, which in turn triggers
> > devfs module probing.
> 
> Hmmm.  What kind of module probing?  Rescanning the partition table?
> (I don't have devfs here...)

My Debian-default modules.conf has:

alias /dev/ide/host*/bus*/target*/lun*/*        /dev/ide
probeall  /dev/ide              ide-probe-mod ide-disk ide-cd ide-tape 
ide-floppy

It means every time you try to open for example
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/partN then it will try to load
ide-probe-mod ide-disk ide-cd ide-tape ide-floppy, which I guess in turn
probe the hardware to see if it is installed. All of this takes a lot of
time.

> > With the following simple patch, the time required is down to 0.05
> > seconds. Is this a good thing or am I going to destroy my disks?
> 
> Why not structure the loop around scanning the directory, rather than
> around iterating through partition numbers?

Being not so confident with the code, I didn't want to change the
behaviour for non-devfs installations. I also wanted to be able to
use _device_get_part_path, etc. The cost of scanning the directory
15 times is really low in any case, so I think that the code as is more
readable and not really unoptimal.

Cheers
David

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