From: Björn Stenberg <bjorn_at_haxx.se>
Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2003 10:57:19 +0200

Hi all.

This is not really Rockbox related, but might be of interest to some of you.

I have written a patch for the linux kernel that addresses a shortcoming in the linux fat filesystem driver. The fat driver starts searching for free clusters at the beginning of the partition, instead of using the hint that is available in the file system on disk. This can cause a delay of several minutes for the first write after mount if the disk is connected over a slow link such as usb 1.1.

My patch changes the fat driver to use the hint, and thereby eliminates much of the searching. The first-write delay is now typically less than a second.

The patch is available for linux 2.4.20 and 2.5.68, although since this code is rarely changed the patch will most likely apply on older versions too (such as 2.4.18 that is used in redhat 8.0).

The patches are:
  http://bjorn.haxx.se/isd200/fat-2.4.20.patch
  http://bjorn.haxx.se/isd200/fat-2.5.68.patch

I have submitted these to the linux-kernel mailing list. Time will tell if/when this will be included in the mainline kernel.

-- 
Björn

Received on 2003-04-23