Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932179AbWEAPRk (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 May 2006 11:17:40 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932178AbWEAPRk (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 May 2006 11:17:40 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:23269 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932134AbWEAPRj (ORCPT ); Mon, 1 May 2006 11:17:39 -0400 Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 08:17:35 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Andrew Morton cc: Neil Brown , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH 004 of 11] md: Increase the delay before marking metadata clean, and make it configurable. In-Reply-To: <20060430231303.6b2bce82.akpm@osdl.org> Message-ID: References: <20060501152229.18367.patches@notabene> <1060501053019.22949@suse.de> <20060430224404.1060d29a.akpm@osdl.org> <17493.42109.153523.381980@cse.unsw.edu.au> <20060430231303.6b2bce82.akpm@osdl.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1299 Lines: 31 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 - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/