Why do people switch to Linux 13488

On Tuesday 01 November 2005 04:54, Tim Smith stood up and spoke the following words to the mbuttes incomp.os.linux.advocacy...:

This is a deliberate fragmentation technique, and unlike a real-life situation to occur. I also doubt that any programmer with ethics would implement such a procedure.

As a sidenote, fragmentation may be a totally irrelevant factor in certain filesystems. I believereiserfsis such a filesystem.

TheXFSfilesystem can also suffer from fragmentation. That's why thexfsutilspackage comes with a defragmenter. However, fragmentation would not occur on allXFSfilesystems. It could only occur on filesystems with lots of small files, and it would take lots of time before the filesystem would get there.

Additionally,XFStypically only commits the data to the disk at the very last moment, which means that your fragmentation algorithm would only run in the virtual filesystem, and not directly in the on-disk filesystem.

The ability to mount certain filesystems read-only in GNU-Linux also protects those from fragmentation, as does the ability to spit up static data and dynamic data.

The latter is not possible in a Windows installation without seriously tweaking the registry - I know that because I've tried it -aftereverything is already installed, since that is the only time when all that needs to write to the registry has already done so and their keys can thus be traced for modification.

Mounting hard disk parbreastions as read-only is not possible in Windows at

-- With kind regards,

*Aragorn* (Registered GNU-Linux user #223157)