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

Ingo Molnar
2007-08-05T07:37:09Z

* Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:

> > it's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times.
> > Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit:
>
> Think about the user for a moment instead.
>
> Do things right. The job of the kernel is not to "correct" for
> distribution policy decisions. The distributions need to change
> policy. You do that by showing the distributions the numbers.

you try to put the blame into distribution makers' shoes but in reality,
had the kernel stepped forward with a neat .config option sooner
(combined with a neat boot option as well to turn it off), we'd have had
noatime systems 10 years ago. A new entry into relnotes and done. It's
_much less_ of a compatibility impact than many of the changes that
happen in a new distro release. (new glibc, new compiler, new kernel)

Distro makers did not dare to do this sooner because some kernel
developers came forward with these mostly bogus arguments ... The impact
of atime is far better understood by the kernel community, so it is the
responsibility of _us_ to signal such things towards distributors, not
the other way around.

Ingo