[comp.os.minix] Don Chapman's format program

dprrhb@inetg1.ARCO.COM (Reginald H. Beardsley) (06/17/91)

  Has anyone gotten the format program posted by Andy on 6 June to work 
properly.  I compiled it yesterday on a Compaq LTE/286 running a slightly
modified version of 1.5 and found that it was taking over 1 minute per 
track :-(   Since this works out to over 2 hours to format a 1.44MB disk
I killed the program.  It appears to be spending all the time in the 
format_track() function.  Does anyone know anything about this?  I had
similar
experiences with another format program which I think was written by Bruce
Evans (it's been a while, might have been someone else's).  Do I have some
system anomaly?

-- 
Reginald H. Beardsley       
ARCO Information Services
Plano, TX 75075           
Phone: (214)-754-6785
Internet: dprrhb@arco.com 

ast@cs.vu.nl (Andy Tanenbaum) (06/18/91)

In article <1991Jun17.132446.12460@Arco.COM> dprrhb@inetg1.ARCO.COM (Reginald H. Beardsley) writes:
>
>  Has anyone gotten the format program posted by Andy on 6 June to work 
>properly.

I have used it several times with no problems.  Sometimes when things are
slow, try chmem to give the program a lot more stack space.  I think there
are some library routines that call malloc for space, and if there isn't
any, do all I/O one char at a time.  Please try this and post a short note
telling what happened.

Andy Tanenbaum (ast@cs.vu.nl)

hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at (Peter Holzer) (06/19/91)

dprrhb@inetg1.ARCO.COM (Reginald H. Beardsley) writes:

>[newly posted format needs 1 minute per track]
>experiences with another format program which I think was written by Bruce
>Evans (it's been a while, might have been someone else's).  Do I have some
>system anomaly?

Seems so. I have not yet tested the new format program, but I am using 
Bruce's all the time and it seems to be at least as fast as MS-DOS
format.


>--
>Reginald H. Beardsley
>ARCO Information Services
>Plano, TX 75075
>Phone: (214)-754-6785
>Internet: dprrhb@arco.com
--
|    _  | Peter J. Holzer                       | Think of it   |
| |_|_) | Technical University Vienna           | as evolution  |
| | |   | Dept. for Real-Time Systems           | in action!    |
| __/   | hp@vmars.tuwien.ac.at                 |     Tony Rand |