Re: [PATCH 004 of 11] md: Increase the delay before marking metadata clean, and make it configurable.

Linus Torvalds
2006-05-01T15:17:40Z

On Sun, 30 Apr 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:
>
> Generally I don't think we should be teaching the kernel to accept
> pretend-floating-point numbers like this, especially when a) "delay in
> milliseconds" is such a simple concept and b) it's so easy to go from float
> to milliseconds in userspace.
>
> Do you really expect that humans (really dumb ones ;)) will be echoing
> numbers into this file? Or will it mainly be a thing for mdadm to fiddle
> with?

I generally hate interfaces that have some "random base".

So "delay in seconds" is not a random base, because "seconds" is a good SI
base unit, and there's not a lot of question about it. But once you start
talking milliseconds on microseconds, I'd actually much rather have a
"fake floating point number" over having different files have different
(magic) base constants. How do you remember which are milliseconds, which
are microseconds, and which are just seconds?

It should be easy to have a helper function or two that takes a "struct
timeval" and reads/writes a "float".

Linus