On 9/28/2010 9:10 AM, Christopher Faylor wrote:
It isn't extremely surprising that Linux access speed for a filesystem
in a simulated environment, which presumably does not go through
multiple layers of DLLs, would be faster than Cygwin.
I think it more likely that the HGFS driver doesn't try to preserve full
POSIX semantics. There's plenty of precedent: vfat, iso9660... One could
probably verify this faster by examining the driver's source code
(http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/) than by tracing syscalls.
If that's the explanation, it points at a possible path forward.
On Linux, these secondary filesystems aren't expected to provide full POSIX
semantics, simply because they are secondary. No one cries very hard that
you can't make symlinks on a FAT-formatted USB stick.
Yet, there's probably no technical reason you couldn't get a POSIX-like
system to run on a crippled filesystem. It's probably even been done lots
of times before in the embedded world. Some of the PC Unix systems from the
80s and early 90s were pretty screwy in this way, too. Screwy doesn't
prevent you from doing useful work, though.
Would it not be useful to have a mode in Cygwin that purposely skips any
POSIX semantics that it can't get for free by making the POSIX syscalls
nothing more than thin wrappers around the nearest equivalent Win32 API? If
you put it in this mode and it breaks, you get to keep both pieces. There
are those who would happily accept the speed increase for loss of some
functionality. I wouldn't, but some would. I'd bet a lot of the 3PPs are
in that group, since they know their target environment very well.