On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 01:52:38PM +0200, Mason wrote: > Hello everyone, > > As far as I can tell from a quick Google search, > there was a push in 2007 to add support for large > blocks in some file-systems, in particular ext2. > > e.g. cf. http://lwn.net/Articles/239090/ > > Was this ever accepted into the main line? > (It seems to have lived within -mm for a while) Nope, it never was (as you've by now figured out). > I'm working with a ST Microelectronics set-top box. > Here are a few performance results for a 2TB USB HDD: > block size 4k : format = 151 s / mount = 242 s > block size 8k : format = 52 s / mount = 71 s > block size 16k : format = 30 s / mount = 36 s > block size 32k : format = 18 s / mount = 19 s > > Using 4kB blocks makes mount too slow on the STB, which > is why I'd like to use larger blocks. It would be nice > if the movies recorded on the STB could also be read on > a Linux PC. My guess is the mount time slowness is caused an ancient kernel running on the ST Microelectronics box which is doing mount-time sanity checks. You can disable this with the mount option -o nocheck. A lot of the rationale for larger block sizes was obviated by the use of more advanced file systems, such as ext4, which have other methods of dealing with the inefficiencies caused by smaller block sizes. If your main complaint with using a 4k block size on the set-top box was the mount-time slowness, that can be fixed with the nocheck mount option. Regards, - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
