Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933379AbXHDUGR (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:06:17 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1762892AbXHDUGE (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:06:04 -0400 Received: from outpipe-village-512-1.bc.nu ([81.2.110.250]:58614 "EHLO the-village.bc.nu" rhost-flags-OK-FAIL-OK-FAIL) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755967AbXHDUGC (ORCPT ); Sat, 4 Aug 2007 16:06:02 -0400 Date: Sat, 4 Aug 2007 21:11:56 +0100 From: Alan Cox To: Ingo Molnar Cc: =?UTF-8?B?SsO2cm4=?= Engel , Jeff Garzik , Linus Torvalds , Peter Zijlstra , linux-mm@kvack.org, Linux Kernel Mailing List , miklos@szeredi.hu, akpm@linux-foundation.org, neilb@suse.de, dgc@sgi.com, tomoki.sekiyama.qu@hitachi.com, nikita@clusterfs.com, trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no, yingchao.zhou@gmail.com, richard@rsk.demon.co.uk, david@lang.hm Subject: Re: [PATCH 00/23] per device dirty throttling -v8 Message-ID: <20070804211156.5f600d80@the-village.bc.nu> In-Reply-To: <20070804192130.GA25346@elte.hu> References: <20070803123712.987126000@chello.nl> <20070804063217.GA25069@elte.hu> <20070804070737.GA940@elte.hu> <20070804103347.GA1956@elte.hu> <20070804163733.GA31001@elte.hu> <46B4C0A8.1000902@garzik.org> <20070804191205.GA24723@lazybastard.org> <20070804192130.GA25346@elte.hu> X-Mailer: Claws Mail 2.9.1 (GTK+ 2.10.13; i386-redhat-linux-gnu) Organization: Red Hat UK Cyf., Amberley Place, 107-111 Peascod Street, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 1TE, Y Deyrnas Gyfunol. Cofrestrwyd yng Nghymru a Lloegr o'r rhif cofrestru 3798903 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1434 Lines: 33 > i use Mutt myself, on such a filesystem: > > /dev/md0 on / type ext3 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,user_xattr) > > and i can see no problems, it notices new mails just fine. In some setups it will and in others it won't. Nor is it the only application that has this requirement. Ext3 currently is a standards compliant file system. Turn off atime and its very non standards compliant, turn to relatime and its not standards compliant but nobody will break (which is good) Either change is a big user/kernel interface change and no major vendor targets desktop as primary market so I'm not suprised they haven't done this. The fix is to educate them further not to break the kernel. There are several reasons for that - Distros will change the least conservative stuff first so we have the dedicated followers of fashion finding problems first - Existing systems won't suddenly change behaviour and break (and as the catastrophic failure case is backup failure we do not want to break them) People just need to know about the performance differences - very few realise its more than a fraction of a percent. I'm sure Gentoo will use relatime the moment anyone knows its > 5% 8) Alan - 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/