On 2024-04-09, Stanislav Syekirin <stanislav.syeki...@studium.fernuni-hagen.de> wrote: > Hi, > > I'm trying to figure out the best way to format a USB stick as FAT32. > This is what I've tried: > > $ time doas newfs_msdos /dev/rsd1c > /dev/rsd1c: 60007944 sectors in 7500993 FAT32 clusters (4096 > bytes/cluster) > bps=512 spc=8 res=32 nft=2 mid=0xf0 spt=63 hds=255 hid=0 bsec=60125184 > bspf=58602 rdcl=2 infs=1 bkbs=2 > 20m08.34s real 0m00.35s user 0m12.81s system > > As you can see, it takes many minutes, and the elapsed time is much > larger than the CPU time. Looking at top while the command runs shows > that newfs_msdos has PRI -5, its CPU usage fluctuates around 0.5%, > STATE is mostly "sleep" with WAIT being "physio". > > The same happens if I call newfs_ext2fs -I. > > For comparison, `newfs /dev/rsd1c` is almost instantaneous: 0m00.88s > real 0m00.06s user 0m00.16s system. It doesn't work if the disk is
IIUC newfs_msdos has to wrote a lot more than FFS2 newfs. And writes to USB drives are not particularly quick on OpenBSD. > already formatted as FAT32, though: I have to call `fdisk -e sd1`, and > reinit, otherwise I get a "can't rewrite disk label" error; I'm not > sure why newfs cares and newfs_msdos doesn't, maybe I'm doing it wrong > somehow. sd1c shouldn't be used for filesystems. It is a special device node for "the entire disk". See disklabel(8). For a single filesystem on a drive, use either a BSD disklabel with an 'a' partition, or a DOS/GPT partition (whuch you can setup with fdisk) and the 'spoofed' partition letter (/dev/sd1i for the first one). > How can I speed the creation of a FAT32 or Ext2 file system up? Maybe increasing block size will help. If not, I don't think there's really much you can do. There's no "quick format" option for newfs_msdos lile there is on Windows. -- Please keep replies on the mailing list.
