Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 22:19:06 -0600
From: "Serge E. Hallyn" <serue@us.ibm.com>
To: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>
Cc: trond.myklebust@fys.uio.no, viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk, nfsv4@linux-nfs.org,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH 01/45] Create a dynamically sized pool of threads for
	doing very slow work items [ver #41]
Message-ID: <20081219041906.GA30320@us.ibm.com>
References: <20081120144139.10667.75519.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk> <20081120144145.10667.39594.stgit@warthog.procyon.org.uk>
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Quoting David Howells (dhowells@redhat.com):
> Create a dynamically sized pool of threads for doing very slow work items, such
> as invoking mkdir() or rmdir() - things that may take a long time and may
> sleep, holding mutexes/semaphores and hogging a thread, and are thus unsuitable
> for workqueues.
> 
> The number of threads is always at least a settable minimum, but more are
> started when there's more work to do, up to a limit.  Because of the nature of
> the load, it's not suitable for a 1-thread-per-CPU type pool.  A system with
> one CPU may well want several threads.
> 
> This is used by FS-Cache to do slow caching operations in the background, such
> as looking up, creating or deleting cache objects.
> 
> Signed-off-by: David Howells <dhowells@redhat.com>

Acked-by: Serge Hallyn <serue@us.ibm.com>
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