On Wed, 12 Dec 2007, Stephen Borrill wrote:
>  Why swap round stat and open?

stat on ustarfs is expensive.  I might need to search through many
floppy disks before discovering that the file doesn't exist.

The build process used to take care to create the ustarfs file system
with files packed into the archive in the same order as the open
attempts, to minimise or eliminate seeks through multiple floppies.

--apb (Alan Barrett)