Subject: Re: [linux-audio-dev] ardour and sweep.
From: Steve Harris (S.W.Harris_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk)
Date: Tue Oct 17 2000 - 20:49:52 EEST
On Tue, Oct 17, 2000 at 12:59:36PM -0400, Paul Barton-Davis wrote:
> >Something I'm not clear on: I know that linux doesn't actually write disk
> >blocks that are empty, when recording nothing in ardour, but what happens
> >if you write silence? And what happens if you load up the track(s) into
> >an editor, process them (say, add reverb), and then save out, I presume
> >that you will get lots of actual blocks of zeros, or is the filesystem
> >smart enough to spot blocks with no data in them.
>
> Nope. The moment you touch 1+ bytes in a block (the blocksize is
> typically 2kB or 4kB), that block is allocated. It doesn't attempt to
> divine that "0" is special - if you wrote to the block, the block is
> allocated. This would be a cool trick in some ways, but it would also
> slow down the FS - it would be constantly checking block contents
> during writes.
Should have though of that: there would be a performance penalty for
writing blocks of zero's with a one at the end! Can't see that going down
well.
- Steve
--
Stephen Harris
MALIBU Technical Officer & JoDI Webmaster
IAM Research Group
University of Southampton, UK
07970 557047
swh_AT_ecs.soton.ac.uk 023 8059 2774
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