[ILUG] Reiserfs storage efficiency

[Wesley Darlington]

Howdy,

On Sat, Dec 30, 2000 at 03:16:31AM +0000, David Murphy wrote:
> Quoting <20001229173741.A17664 at blackstar.co.uk>
> by Wesley Darlington <wesley at blackstar.co.uk>:
> 
> > Why find|cpio? What's wrong with "cp -a"? (I'm just curious here,
> > mind - I'm not being antagonistic! ;-)
> 
> Because find & cpio are more common than 'cp -a'? At least, the cp on
> this FreeBSD box knows of no such option.

As reasons go, that's a good'un. How does find|cpio compare speedwise to 
cp? About the same, are they?

ISTR using `cp -dpR' on various boxen in the dim, distant past, when all
my world wasn't a linux...

On a related note, I sometimes use cp to backup big oft-changed files to 
places whence I can copy them to tape at leisure. It irritates me (only
slightly) that copying in the old files floods the file cache, and writing
the new files out floods the buffer (*). I'd like to be able to (i) not
flood the cache on read-in, if possible and, much more importantly, (ii)
not flood the buffer on write-out. Anybody got any thoughts on how this
might be accomplished? Something to do with rawio, or something?

Thanks,
Wesley.

(*) And while 2.4, and other OSes, don't differentiate between these, I'm 
not bothered by the two caches in 2.2 in this case. At least, I don't think
I am...?