Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8

Bill Davidsen
2007-08-08T20:31:48Z

Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> Being standards compliant is not an argument it's a design goal, a
>> requirement. Standards compliance is like pregant, you are or you're
>
> Linux history says different. There was always the "final 1%" of
> compliance that required silliness we really did not want to bother with.

This is not 1%, this is a user-visible change in behavior, relative to
all previous Linux versions. There has been a way for ages to trade
performance for standards for users or distributions, and standards have
been chosen. Given that there is now a way to get virtually all of the
performance without giving up atime completely, why the sudden attempt
to change to a less satisfactory default?

I could understand a push to quickly get relatime with a few
enhancements (the functionality if not the exact code) into
distributions, even as a default, but forcing user or distribution
changes just to retain the same dehavior doesn't seem reasonable. It
assumes that vendors and users are so stupid they can't understand why
benchmark results and more important than standards. People who run
servers are smart enough to decide if their application will run as
expected without atime.

People have lived with this compromise for a very long time, and it
seems that a far more balanced solution will be in the kernel soon.

--
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
CTO TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with small computers since 1979