Re: Logical tape pause/resume

On 10/04/2016 05:58 PM, Simon Riggs wrote:
> On 4 October 2016 at 12:47, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> wrote:
>
>>> Why not just make each new run start at a block boundary?
>>> That way we waste on average BLCKSZ/2 disk space per run, which is
>>> negligible but we avoid any need to have code to read back in the last
>>> block.
>>
>> Hmm. You'd still have to read back the last block, so that you can update
>> its next-pointer.
>
> If each run is in its own file, then you can skip that bit.

Then you need to remember the names of the files, in memory. That's
closer to my idea of having only one run on each tape, but you're taking
further by also saying that each tape is a separate file.

That might be a good idea for building the initial runs. Each file would
then be written and read sequentially, so we could perhaps get rid of
the whole pre-reading code, and rely completely on OS read-ahead.

However, can't really do that for multi-pass merges, because you want to
reuse the space of the input tapes for the output tape, as you go.

> And we do want the sort to disk to use multiple files so we can
> parallelize I/O as well as CPU.

Huh? Why can't you parallelize I/O on a single file?

- Heikki