Re: WANTED: kernel projects for CS students

[Pavel Machek <pavel@ucw.cz>]

On Mon 2007-10-29 15:48:20, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2007 at 06:07:07PM +0000, Pavel Machek wrote:
> > Hard stuff:
> > 
> > * network character device -- similar to nbd, but for char devices.
> >   either figure out how to forward ioctls(), or implement
> >   usb-over-network, or...
> > 
> > * openMosix -- they seem to have userspace solution, but not GPLed.
> > 
> > * compression for ext4. Its about time someone did it right. Special
> >   bonus if you can do it in a way that it does not slow down. If cpu
> >   is free, compress, if it is busy, just write it straight to disk.
> 
> So if I decide that the cpu is busy (because something is asking me to
> write the cpu is clearly doing something and hence busy), then I can
> skip compression and just write to disk.  So by that definition ext4
> already does compression.  What a simple project. :)

Tell it to your profesor ;-).

> Did you mean it ought to come back and do the compression later?

Not neccessarily but yes, that would be nice, too.

> Is it possible that for some data compressing it and writing will take
> less time than not compressing it and writing it to disk?

Yes. Typically for all zeros. It will be similar for
highly-compressible data (pictures, timetables, ....)

root@amd:/data/tmp# time ( cat /dev/zero | head -c 100000000 > delme; sync )
0.04user 0.48system 6.52 (0m6.521s) elapsed 7.97%CPU
root@amd:/data/tmp# time ( cat /dev/zero | head -c 100000000 > delme; sync )
0.05user 0.61system 6.33 (0m6.333s) elapsed 10.42%CPU
root@amd:/data/tmp# time ( cat /dev/zero | head -c 100000000 | gzip - > delme; sync )
1.57user 0.32system 1.74 (0m1.749s) elapsed 100.00%CPU
root@amd:/data/tmp# time ( cat /dev/zero | head -c 100000000 | gzip - > delme; sync )
1.61user 0.18system 1.65 (0m1.652s) elapsed 100.00%CPU

									Pavel
-- 
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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