Subject: Re: Progress meter for fsck, revisited
To: Nathan J. Williams <>
From: Andrew Brown <>
List: tech-userlevel
Date: 01/14/2004 08:50:22
>> Well, I disagree. I think it's a cool thing to have in the tree, and it 
>> can benefit a number of users. Also, it is an option, after all.
>"A number". How many? Enabling it hurts performance whenever you have
>more than one disk.

my laptop has only one disk.  i imagine lots of people have laptops.
i have a rather large hard drive in it, too, and i'd like to know how
far along the fsck is.  granted, i can hit ^t, but that only tells me
for that partition.

>And again, the fact that it is an option is not justification. I could
>add my undergraduate transcript to a kernel file, inside #ifdef
>NATHANW_TRANSCRIPT. It's an option. Does that make it OK?

no, you're right.  it's not okay to put your transcript there.

otoh, no one is going to work on your transcript.  someone may pick up
the progress bar stuff and make it better.

>> And, it can serve as a building block/example for a parallel progress 
>> meter implementation in the future.
>The whole problem is that it isn't parallel at all. If it were a meter
>of the progresss of parallel processes, I'd be just fine with it.

i'm sure it can be done, even if we have to use pipes or something.
