i don't understand what printed sync... - venti or fossil? boot from a boot cd and then run venti/venti -c config by hand, and then you can run ps and acid to see what it is spending its time doing.
i half-doubt that venti is actually the one sitting around. it could be that fossil is trying to write the initial set of blocks out to venti, and that that's what is taking a while. but booting from a cd and being able to run ps, etc. will tell you for sure. finally, don't underestimate the slowness of non-dma disk. venti is *very* disk-intensive. i was measuring some changes i had made to venti recently and was very surprised that i was only getting under 1MB/s, and then i realized that dma was off. it matters. what's your venti config? russ
