Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1765997AbZDBW74 (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:59:56 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1762561AbZDBW7l (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:59:41 -0400 Received: from smtp1.linux-foundation.org ([140.211.169.13]:59991 "EHLO smtp1.linux-foundation.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1764175AbZDBW7k (ORCPT ); Thu, 2 Apr 2009 18:59:40 -0400 Date: Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:51:56 -0700 From: Andrew Morton To: Linus Torvalds Cc: jeff@garzik.org, drees76@gmail.com, j@jannau.net, lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca, tytso@mit.edu, jesper@krogh.cc, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: Linux 2.6.29 Message-Id: <20090402155156.33d98b27.akpm@linux-foundation.org> In-Reply-To: References: <20090325183011.GN32307@mit.edu> <20090325220530.GR32307@mit.edu> <20090326171148.9bf8f1ec.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20090326174704.cd36bf7b.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20090326182519.d576d703.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <20090401210337.GB3797@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> <20090402110532.GA5132@aniel> <72dbd3150904020929w46c6dc0bs4028c49dd8fa8c56@mail.gmail.com> <20090402094247.9d7ac19f.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <49D53787.9060503@garzik.org> X-Mailer: Sylpheed version 2.2.4 (GTK+ 2.8.20; i486-pc-linux-gnu) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1002 Lines: 22 On Thu, 2 Apr 2009 15:42:51 -0700 (PDT) Linus Torvalds 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. -- 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/