1988 Reports

Rapid location of mount points

Smith, Jonathan M.

"Mount points" allow more storage to be grafted into tree-structured hierarchical file systems. Administrative tasks use their locations, which are tabulated in a file. In our System V UNIX environment, this file was occasionally removed. Getmnt was written to recover the information. Getmnt has had three significant versions. The original version (getmntl) was a highly optimized naive tree traversal. Getmnt2 improved the real time performance by a mean factor of 7 by pruning unnecessary branches from the transversal. Getmnt3 doubled getmnt2' s speed, with a change from depth-first to breadth-first search. On our development system, getmnt1 required 647.6 seconds to run, while getmnt3 required 42.53 seconds.