Re: [PATCH 07/13] writeback: explicit low bound for vm.dirty_ratio

Neil Brown
2010-08-10T03:57:29Z

On Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:12:06 +0900 (JST)
KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com> wrote:

> > Subject: writeback: explicit low bound for vm.dirty_ratio
> > From: Wu Fengguang <fengguang.wu@intel.com>
> > Date: Thu Jul 15 10:28:57 CST 2010
> >
> > Force a user visible low bound of 5% for the vm.dirty_ratio interface.
> >
> > This is an interface change. When doing
> >
> > echo N > /proc/sys/vm/dirty_ratio
> >
> > where N < 5, the old behavior is pretend to accept the value, while
> > the new behavior is to reject it explicitly with -EINVAL. This will
> > possibly break user space if they checks the return value.
>
> Umm.. I dislike this change. Is there any good reason to refuse explicit
> admin's will? Why 1-4% is so bad? Internal clipping can be changed later
> but explicit error behavior is hard to change later.

As a data-point, I had a situation a while back where I needed a value below
1 to get desired behaviour. The system had lots of RAM and fairly slow
write-back (over NFS) so a 'sync' could take minutes.

So I would much prefer allowing not only 1-4, but also fraction values!!!

I can see no justification at all for setting a lower bound of 5. Even zero
can be useful - for testing purposes mostly.

NeilBrown

> personally I prefer to
> - accept all value, or
> - clipping value in dirty_ratio_handler
>
> Both don't have explicit ABI change.
>
> Thanks.
>
>
>
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