> Another effectively useless tunefs parameter is fs_rotdelay - an
> estimate of the number of milliseconds it takes the disk driver to
> handle an interrupt. The idea was to optimise the physical placement
> of the logical blocks of a file. Hopefully the N+1th logical block of
> a file would appear under the disk heads just after the driver had
> processed the interrupt for block N. [Unix processes tend to read
> files sequentially.] Now this was a good thing in the days of 1 MIP
> CPUs and stupid but simple SMD controllers. Today it's pointless:

I believe that it does serve a limted but useful purpose in NetBSD.
NetBSD DOES support those super old, super slow devices, and people
ARE still running them. If this were an OS geared toward highend Alphas,
I'd quickly say, "Take it out!" But my guess is that my old hp300 systems
with the RLL drives benifit from the optimizations.

Are there any modern optimizations that can be done in software? Maybe
the file system code could be modified to fit both old and new.

        Nathan