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

Jakob Oestergaard
2007-08-05T13:46:45Z

On Sun, Aug 05, 2007 at 02:46:48PM +0200, Ingo Molnar wrote:
>
> * Jakob Oestergaard <jakob@unthought.net> wrote:
>
> > > If you can show massive amounts of users that will actually be
> > > negatively impacted, please present hard evidence.
> > >
> > > Otherwise all this is useless hot air.
> >
> > Peace Jeff :)
> >
> > In another mail, I gave an example with tmpreaper clearing out unused
> > files; if some of those files are only read and never modified,
> > tmpreaper would start deleting files which were still frequently used.
> >
> > That's a regression, the way I see it. As for 'massive amounts of
> > users', well, tmpreaper exists in most distros, so it's possible it
> > has other users than just me.
>
> you mean tmpwatch?

Same same.

> The trivial change below fixes this. And with that
> we've come to the end of an extremely short list of atime dependencies.

Please read what I wrote, not what you think I wrote.

If I only *read* those files, the mtime will not be updated, only the
atime.

And the files *will* then magically begin to disappear although they are
frequently used.

That will happen with a standard piece of software in a standard
configuration, in a scenario that may or may not be common... I have no
idea how common such a setup is - but I know how much it would suck to
have files magically disappearing because of a kernel upgrade :)

--

/ jakob