Re: [PATCH] Add Kconfig option for default swappiness

[Ben Gamari <bgamari.foss@gmail.com>]

On Tue, 2 Nov 2010 12:39:52 -0700 (PDT), David Rientjes <rientjes@google.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2 Nov 2010, Ben Gamari wrote:
> > Packaging concerns, as I mentioned before,
> 
> That you snipped from the changelog?
> 
Guilty as charged. Sorry about that, time has been in short supply
recently.

> You could say the same thing for any sysctl, it's not indicative of why 
> this particular change is needed in the kernel.
> 
This is certainly true; a distribution could in principle want to tweak
the default values of any of the sysctl knobs. If we wanted to tweak
anything else in addition to swappiness that I wouldn't have even
bothered to submit the patch since I'll be the first to admit that the
precedent set by further growing the Kconfig phase space is not a
positive one. That being said, swappiness is one of the more significant
knobs in the vm and certainly one of the more likely to be tuned by a
distribution.

> Let's not have the "in short" answer, what's the "long" answer?

See my recent response to Wu Fengguang.

Cheers,

- Ben