Re: Ping? RE: [GIT PULL] mm/vfs/fs:cleancache for 2.6.37 merge window

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Wed, 27 Oct 2010 11:37:47 -0700 (PDT) Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> wrote:

> Ping?  I hope you are still considering this.  If not or if
> there are any questions I can answer, please let me know.

What's happened here is that the patchset has gone through its
iterations and a few people have commented and then after a while,
nobody had anything to say about the code so nobody said anything more.

But silence doesn't mean acceptance - it just means that nobody had
anything to say.

I think I looked at the earlier iterations, tried to understand the
point behind it all, made a few code suggestions and eventually tuned
out.  At that time (and hence at this time) I just cannot explain to
myself why we would want to merge this code.

All new code is a cost/benefit decision.  The costs are pretty well
known: larger codebase, more code for us and our "customers" to
maintain and support, etc.  That the code pokes around in vfs and
various filesystems does increase those costs a little.

But the extent of the benefits to our users aren't obvious to me.  The
code is still xen-specific, I believe?  If so, that immediately reduces
the benefit side by a large amount simply because of the reduced
audience.

We did spend some time trying to get this wired up to zram so that the
feature would be potentially useful to *all* users, thereby setting the
usefulness multiplier back to 1.0.  But I don't recall that anything
came of this?

I also don't know how useful the code is to its intended
micro-audience: xen users!


So can we please revisit all this from the top level?  Jeremy, your
input would be valuable.  Christoph, I recall that you had technical
objections - can you please repeat those?


It's the best I can do to kick this along, sorry.