Re: choosing the file system block size

[Mouse <mouse%Rodents-Montreal.ORG@localhost>]

>> I'd suggest reading over the source to newfs and/or fsck; they know
>> a good deal about that stuff, and are much smaller and more
>> comprehensible than the filesystem kernel code.
> Basically, I gave up on that after realising that both "number of
> blocks" and "number of data blocks" where actually in units of --
> fragments!  There seems to be a lot of stuff in that which is
> probably perfectly clear for those actually dealing with FS code, but
> close to incomprehensible for a newcomer in that area.

Heh.  The FFS code is full of delightful little surprises like that.
In fsresize.c, the source to my program which becamse resize_ffs, there
are a number of minor rants about other filesystem programs, such as
fsck and newfs/mkfs.  Most/all of them are still present in resize_ffs
source as of 4.0.1; I haven't bothered checking anything more recent.

> Is there any good book on the subject?

I don't know.  I don't know of any such book, but I've never looked; my
own knowledge of such things comes from experimentation and code
reading.

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