Hello, LFS-6.3 includes a kernel that has the following bug: the statfs syscall (used, e.g., for obtaining the amount of free space) on vfat filesystems takes a long time (40 seconds on my 80 GB iPod) unless the "usefree" mount option is supplied (but it is considered unsafe because Windows Vista does not update the count of free clusters correctly). However, HAL-based automounters don't set this option by default, and unpatched HAL won't even accept it. This leads to "hung" Nautilus processes in Gnome (see, e.g., https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/133567), and I was biten by the Xfce equivalent of this bug (in xfce4-mount-plugin, without HAL - the panel icon doesn't respond to clicks if iPod is mounted).
The problem is that nobody upstream wants to accept responsibility for this bug. A patch exists for HAL to accept "usefree" as a valid mount option (http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/attachments/20071023/e8377b46/attachment.patch), but HAL developers don't want it to go upstream (see http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/hal/2007-October/009810.html, they want distros to fix their kernels). A kernel patch that speeds up statfs on vfat without the "usefree" option is available (http://lkml.org/lkml/2007/11/4/135), but it is still slower than the "usefree" (5 seconds on my iPod with the patch vs less than 1 second with "usefree"). However, it is nowhere near the stable linux kernel series (e.g., because it fails the "already in linus tree" requirement), and thus one can't expect LFS-6.3 to pick up this kernel fix via its "use the latest 2.6.22.x kernel" advice. Therefore, I think that a patch has to be applied for HAL to accept the "usefree" VFAT mount option, and instructions added for both KDE and GNOME that set this option by default on VFAT filesystems. For GNOME, this is the /system/storage/default_options/vfat/mount_options gconf key. BTW, when someone finds the KDE equivalent of this key, we can also properly solve the "iocharset" issue that is in the XML comments on the HAL page - this also boils down to the default mount options, and the solution is desktop-specific. Opinions? -- Alexander E. Patrakov -- http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-dev FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page
