15 Dec
2003
15 Dec
'03
2:22 a.m.
Kenneth Stailey <kstailey(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
Did stdio buffering change over time?
Line buffering was a Berkeley innovation. stdout became line-buffered by
default (when it is a terminal) in 4.0BSD. 4.2BSD added setlinebuf(3) to allow
people to make stdout or stderr line-buffered when they want to. 4.3BSD
extended it to work on any stream, not just stdout or stderr.
If you look at an old BSD mkfs for cylinder-group
style file systems (not 7th
Ed filesystems)
Ahmm, you call that old? To me it's new... It's a (wonderful) 4.2BSD
innovation.
but I have memories that the superblocks were printed
out one at a time as if
fflush(stdout) was called between them rather than one line at a time with
line-buffered stdio.
I use 4.3BSD-* systems every day and have been for the past several years, and
you can take my word for it that on all 4.3BSD-* systems, including Quasijarus,
plain 4.3, and Ultrix the alternate superblock list output from mkfs/newfs
appears one line at a time on the tty.
At some point I thought "SysV must have broke
this"
I'm curious, where does SysV fit into this? It's the wonderful 4.2BSD
filesystem a BSD-only thing that Missed'em-five people treated as a satanic
manifestation?
since newfs would print out
a complete row of superblock numbers at once with a big delay between the rows
That's exactly what it does. BTW mkfs = newfs. mkfs was/is the original UNIX
filesystem creator. It was almost completely rewritten in 4.2BSD to create the
new filesystems. At the same time the newfs program was written as a user-
friendly front-end to mkfs (it merely exec'ed mkfs with a bunch of options).
The situation remained in 4.3. In 4.3-Tahoe/Quasijarus mkfs.c and newfs.c are
compiled and linked into one binary called newfs, CSRG was forced to do this in
order to support disk labels.
MS