Re: Linux 2.6.29

Andrew Morton
2009-04-02T22:59:56Z

On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:42:51 -0700 (PDT)
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

> My only point is really that you _can_ do streaming writes well, but at
> the same time I do think the kernel makes it too hard to do it with
> "simple" applications. I'd love to get the same kind of high-speed
> streaming behavior by just doing a simple "dd if=/dev/zero of=bigfile"
>
> And I really think we should be able to.

The thing which has always worried me about trying to do smart
drop-behind is the cost of getting it wrong - and sometimes it _will_
get it wrong.

Someone out there will have an important application which linearly
writes a 1G file and then reads it all back in again. They will get
really upset when their runtime doubles.