Re: nfhd performance

[Petr Stehlik <pstehlik@sophics.cz>]

> Part of the problem is that ByteSwap = No setting.  Contrary to what one might
> think, "No" there actually means "yes, byteswap every sector read or written".
> 
> Grep for byteswap in aranym's src/natfeat/xhdi.cpp if you don't believe me...
> 
> As far as I can tell, this setting is only meaningful if you have an image which
> must be shared with actual HW, and you don't want to byteswap it when migrating
> it between these two roles (HW or aranym).  I don't have that requirement, so I
> run my aranym VMs with ByteSwap = Yes, which eliminates that overhead.

Very true.

> There are also other things in xhdi.cpp I don't really like, such as going through
> stdio when raw Unix file-descriptors would do, and the small I/O unit size.

Please suggest a better yet portable way. I've been thinking about
reading more than a single sector at once, that could help a bit. Should
write a benchmark for it first, it seems.

Petr