21143 updates, and Re: large number of TX packets on ftp

Mitchell Blank Jr mitch@execpc.com
Fri Jul 31 02:53:39 1998


Peter Stein wrote:
> Obviously the code is identical. Does that mean what happens before and after
> this code is called is identical? 

There shouldn't be any major differences.  Once the device is opened, the
VFS layer will direct any read or write syscalls pretty much directly to
those functions.

> >Don't take my word for it - just do a "cat </dev/zero >/dev/null" and watch
> >the lack of disk activity.
> 
> My drive LED lights up in the same way when ftp'ing to /dev/null. What activity
> is causing it to flicker on and off? 

Do you actually have a /dev/null or do you delete it once by accident and
now just have a regular file in its place?  Do a "ls -l /dev/null".
Should look like:

  % ls -l /dev/null
  crw-rw-rw-   1 root     root       1,   3 Dec 31  1979 /dev/null

I can't reproduce your drive flickering under either 2.0 or 2.1.

-Mitch