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Re: Using Cygwin on NT 4.0 and Win2000; a user experience
>>>>> "Max" == Max Bowsher <maxb@ukf.net> writes:
Max> Martin Buchholz wrote:
>> - The recent change to make NTFS files SPARSE by default is a
>> disaster -- less space and time efficient for "normal" files.
>> Please undo this. More details in a separate message.
Max> Actual test data relating to this would be very interesting to see.
Some was included in my other post. I would have done a more
conclusive test, but I now have a working machine that is doing
productive work, and I hesitate to go through another two cycles of
painful cygwin1.dll installs. But I would be willing to do this if
that's what it would take to convince you folks to undo the sparse
file patch.
If you have a Windows 2000 machine (no service packs) and a recent
cygwin, try this experiment:
$ ls -l /etc/passwd
-rw-rw-rw- 1 Martin B Users 628 May 13 04:10 /etc/passwd
$ perl -e 'system("df ."); for (1 ... 1024) { system("cp /etc/passwd foobar$_"); } system("df .")'
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
d: 11767580 4290332 7477248 37% /d
Filesystem 1k-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
d: 11767580 4290332 7477248 37% /d
That's 4kb per small (but not tiny) file with my patch applied.
How much space does yours take? It would be interesting to see
results on Windows XP as well.
(again:) For best reproducibility, I suggest
- windows 2000, no service packs
- do the experiment on an ntfs partition formatted by windows 2000.
I have not done this exact experiment on an unpatched Cygwin, but I
predict it would take either 32kb or 64kb per file (also dependent on
the filesystem cluster size, but that should default to 4kb).
>> - The "grep" package comes with a grep.exe (and no file "grep"), but
>> no egrep.exe (instead it has a "egrep"). Of course this is easy for
>> the user to fix, but the package should be fixed as well.
Max> There is nothing wrong here - it doesn't need to be fixed.
There is non-zero support in Sun's Java SDK to allow building using
Cygwin tools (although MKS is the "official" supported platform).
In one of the Makefiles is this line:
EGREP = $(UNIXCOMMAND_PATH)egrep.exe
Arguably, this is bad code. You should run a command via its name,
sans any .EXE extension. But Cygwin should be consistent; either all
executables are named FOO, or they're named FOO.EXE. Make up your mind.
>> - There have been many reports of rsync hanging, accompanied by an
>> "rsync" process that cannot be killed by "kill -9". I have
>> experienced the same, but only on NT 4.0 SP6, not on Win2000.
Max> Actually not that many reports, and no solid info on how to reproduce the
Max> hang.
Max> Since no one can find out exactly why it is hanging, it can't be fixed.
It's a stress test. rsync'ing 5 files almost always works; rsync'ing
50000 files almost always fails.
I can reproduce it consistently on NT 4.0 SP6, but I don't have the
time to become a Cygwin, rsync, and winsock expert so that I can debug it.
Martin
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