Why is restore so slow?

[terryl at sail.LABS.TEK.COM]

In article <BZS.91Mar3135546 at world.std.com> bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
>But I think to just cast off a reasonable question with "no reasonable
>person would ever want this" often just belies a limit of one's own
>imagination. It's a bad knee-jerk in systems work (particularly
>because systems people are usually woefully ignorant and even callous
>about what their systems are actually used for, and tend to consider
>any feature they're personally not interested in as "unnecessary", I
>consider that to be the dark side of the systems religion.)

     Barry hit the nail squarely on the head, so to speak, and I'll do a little
confessional thing here to demonstrate why(good for the soul, and all that rub-
bish...)

     I do a lot of systems work in my job, the majority of which is kernel-
related work, although I do have some user level experience (have to use what
I develop, ya know...).

     Anyways, rewind back to the early `80's. We rolled our own hardware for
what would now be similar to the original Sun (not a clone, but functionally
equivalent). I was heavily involved in the kernel work, first on V7 Unix(tm),
and then on 4.2 BSD later in the decade.

     Our disk drive of choice was a Micropolis drive with an embedded control-
ler. The early drives had some "interesting" failure modes, so to speak. Once
a particular failure mode appeared (and there were several), the drive was
basically out to lunch. Since I had one of the systems built early in the game,
and since I heavily used my system to continue development, it was a royal pain
in the keester. So I put a LOT of error recovery in the device driver, and
things were hunky dory, and it was released to our general user community.

     Now for the confessional part: If it wasn't MY system that was experien-
cing the difficulties, I doubt that all of that error recovery would have made
it into the device driver. Let's face it, that kind of stuff is not all that
interesting to do, anyways.......

     BTW, I finally powered off my old system about a year ago, `cause I needed
the space it was occupying on my desk in my office, and you wouldn't believe
how emotional it was (NO smileys here). It was just like telling a parent to
abandon a child, because the child was no longer useful to the parent. I've
worked through my guilt now!!!! (-:

__________________________________________________________
Terry Laskodi		"There's a permanent crease
     of			 in your right and wrong."
Tektronix		Sly and the Family Stone, "Stand!"
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