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

Ingo Molnar
2007-08-04T16:56:04Z

* Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> > yeah, it's really ugly. But otherwise i've got no real complaint
> > about ext3 - with the obligatory qualification that
> > "noatime,nodiratime" in /etc/fstab is a must. This speeds up things
> > very visibly - especially when lots of files are accessed. It's kind
> > of weird that every Linux desktop and server is hurt by a noticeable
> > IO performance slowdown due to the constant atime updates,
>
> Not just more IO: it will cause great gobs of blockdev pagecache to
> remain in memory, too.

i tried to convince distro folks about it ... but there's fear,
uncertainty and doubt about touching /etc/fstab and i suspect no major
distro will do it until another does it - which is a catch-22 :-/ So i
guess we should add a kernel config option that allows the kernel rpm
maker to just disable atime by default. (re-enableable via boot-line and
fstab entry too) [That new kernel config option would be disabled by
default.] That makes it much easier to control and introduce.

Ingo