In message <20050412200943.GA12848@panix.com>, Thor Lancelot Simon writes:
>On Tue, Apr 12, 2005 at 08:01:25PM +0000, Martijn van Buul wrote:
>> 
>> Another thing is that newfs (without -O 2) is painstakingly slow. I aborted
>> it after 10 minutes. Creating a ufs2 partition was much faster.
>
>You're running newfs on the block device?  Don't do that.  Use the raw
>device.
>
>In fact, with the current structure of the buffer and page caches you
>pretty much don't want to use the block device for anything at all.
>

My understanding is that FreeBSD has abolished the distinction between 
raw and block devices.  Is this a direction we should go or are going?

		--Prof. Steven M. Bellovin, http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb