Re: vm_dirty_ratio seems a bit large.

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Mar 18 2005 - 14:18:56 EST


Robin Holt <holt@xxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> > No, you could just extend them to understand fixed point. Keep
> > printing integers as integers, print non-integers with one (or two:
> > will we ever need 0.01% increments?) decimal places.
>
> Right now, it is possible to build our largest Altix configuration with
> 64TB of memory (unfortunatetly, we can't get any customers to pay that
> large of bill ;). We are currently shipping a few 4TB systems and hope
> to be selling 20TB systems by the end of the year (at least engineering
> hopes to).
>
> Given that, two decimal places are really not enough. We probably need
> at least 3.
>
> Is there any reason to not do 3 places? Is this the right direction to
> head or does anybody know of problems this would cause?

It's a rather unorthodox fix, but not illogical. I guess it depends upon
how much sysctl infrastructure it adds. Probably quite a lot.

Another approach would be to just say the ratio now has a range 0 ..
999,999 and then, if it happens to be less than 100, treat that as a
percentage for back-compatibility reasons. Although that's a bit kludgy
and perhaps a completely new /proc entry would be better.

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