Re: blocksizes

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 25, 2010 at 08:06:11AM +0000, Michael van Elst wrote:
 > >C hoosing code architectures
 > 
 > 'Redesigning' things to fix bugs seems to be common sense
 > nowadays, as if everything existing is always too bad to be
 > used.
 > 
 > Of course the same is valid for the redesigned code base in
 > the future.

Yes, and after a dozen or so such ground-up rebuilds (provided each
one is informed by the lessons learned in the previous ones) things
start to reach a decent state.

 > One interesting point is that dropping DEV_BSIZE doesn't
 > really mean something new but a jump backwards. That's where
 > we came from, that's what was 'redesigned' then.

But as you may have noticed, I'm not advocating going back to using
random mixtures of block sizes.

 > >In this case, the problem with the way things are is that the way
 > >things are does not work.
 > 
 > It works fine for 16 years now. The problems only come from legacy
 > code and code from other sources that wasn't adapted to the then
 > valid design, mainly because the problems didn't show up immediately
 > due to lack of hardware.

...that is, it works except when it doesn't. :-P

 > The software that needs to be fixed is pretty obvious, it's
 > not a large rototill but if you are into 'redesigning' you
 > may see a lot of places (unrelated to DEV_BSIZE) that could
 > be structured better and cleaned up, e.g. partition handling.
 > 
 > And all this should be done, wether you intend to drop or
 > keep DEV_BSIZE.

Of course...

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost