Basil Chupin wrote:
Nick Selby wrote:
On Tuesday 13 August 2002 14:38, Basil Chupin wrote: <snip>
No, I haven't tried their mailing list. I'm subscribed to too many as it is.
As far as running Windows applications "at native speeds" under Win4Lin is concerned, this is not so - unless there is something wrong in my whole setup. This I will check with a friend of mine (and have been meaning to check with him for a while now) who is also running Win4Lin and because he's been using W4L since version 2 he'll have a better picture of its performance.
From a user on the Netraverse Mailing List: <message> This is a file system issue. Every 5 seconds, the kernel calls "sync" to flush the hdd cache. This updates the atime (access time) on the sync binary executable, which flags the cache as dirty, which means it'll have to be flushed next run (in 5 seconds), which updates the atime on /bin/sync, which ...
Solutions: - search for "update" in your start scripts and call it with different parameters
OR
- mount your ReiserFS partitions "-o noatime" (but you'll lose information about when your files were last accessed, FWIW)
This doesn't look Win4lin specific.
</message>
Comments Anyone?
---------------------------- Nick Selby
German Mobile: +49 173 384 6576 | UK Mobile: +44 781 592 5713 | US Mobile: +1 646 334 3649 *Currently in: Germany*
See my previous comments. It isn't a reiser file system issue per se at all. If it was then as soon as you installed reiserfs or ext3 then the "hits" would begin but they don't. They start when the Win4Lin component is installed (after the Win4Lin kernel is intalled - the kernel itself doesn't generate any "hits").
NeTraverse have been in touch with me and I have now replied to them (just now as a matter of fact). The reason for the "hits" has been now been narrowed down to the process "ventd" which is started by Win4Lin on bootup. If, while running Win4Lin, you CTRL-ALT-F2, logon as root and then KILL the process "opt/win4lin/bin/vnetd" the "hits" will immediately stop.
NeTraverse also suggested I run "unloadem" and "loadem" on a command line to unload/load modules called "mki-adapter" and "Mmerge" which are loaded by Win4Lin, but "unloadem/loadem" are not recognised by SuSE as legitimate commands, and the 2 modules are nowhere to be seen.
I now await NetTraverse's further instructions/comments :-).
Cheers.
The final phase on this matter of the 5-second accessing of the HD when running Win4Lin. The "hits" are caused by the *vnetd *module being run by Win4Lin. This module is loaded on Win4Lin bootup as default even if you did NOT select it on installation of W4L (when you would have selected Winsock rather than vnet). Even though most people would not run W4L on a network nevertheless vnetd is loaded on bootup. If you are running W4L as a single-user then you can easily stop the 5-second "hits" by editing, as root, the //etc/default/*merge*/ file and setting the parameter MERGE_VNETWORK=ON to *OFF*. After you have done this then, if you have booted Linux with the W4L kernel, you can KILL the process *kvnetd *(do /ps aux /as root and you will see it in the list) and then execute on the command line //etc/rc.d/init.d/Win4Lin/ to re-initialise Win4Lin (but without vnetd this time) if you want to keep your current session going, or simply reboot. And no more "hits" :-). Cheers.