Re: WANTED: kernel projects for CS students

["Wander Winkelhorst" <w.winkelhorst@gmail.com>]

On 11/3/07, Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 02 Nov 2007 23:08:23 -0400
> Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu wrote:
>
> > IBM's AIX supported file system compression on the JFS filesystem
> > years ago. I was able to get up to 30% throughput increases by
> > converting the /usr filesystem to compressed - because even a 33mhz
> > Power chipset could read in 5 512-byte blocks and decompress it to
> > the original 4K faster than the disk could read in 8 512-byte
> > blocks.
>
> > Given that today there's an even *bigger* disparity in CPU speed
> > versus disk speed, I'd be surprised if it doesn't help today too.
>
> The problem is that disk seek times have not gotten much
> faster over the years, while disk throughput rates have
> skyrocketed.
>
> Transferring a little less data is not going to help you
> when 80% of your disk time is spent seeking, not reading
> or writing.

This sounds like flash based media are an ideal candidate for compression.
No seek times to speak of, transfer rates that are lower than those of
disks and limited capacity.

I believe JFFS2 (a flash filesystem) allready does compression though.