Re: [Kiobuf-io-devel] RFC: Kernel mechanism: Compound event wait

Marcelo Tosatti
2001-02-06T23:03:54Z

On Tue, 6 Feb 2001, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Remember: in the end you HAVE to wait somewhere. You're always going to be
> able to generate data faster than the disk can take it. SOMETHING has to
> throttle - if you don't allow generic_make_request() to throttle, you have
> to do it on your own at some point. It is stupid and counter-productive to
> argue against throttling. The only argument can be _where_ that throttling
> is done, and READA/WRITEA leaves the possibility open of doing it
> somewhere else (or just delaying it and letting a future call with
> READ/WRITE do the throttling).

Its not "arguing against throttling".

Its arguing against making a smart application block on the disk while its
able to use the CPU for other work.

An application which sets non blocking behavior and busy waits for a
request (which seems to be your argument) is just stupid, of course.