Re: IDEA: multiple dirty lists in buffer.c

Rik van Riel (riel@nl.linux.org)
Tue, 30 Mar 1999 00:07:42 +0200 (CEST)


On Mon, 29 Mar 1999, Gerard Roudier wrote:

> By flushing part of each dirty list at a time (minimum 1 buffer),
> and circularily scanning these dirty lists, bdflush will have far
> more chance to feed several devices, before having to wait, than
> using a single dirty list.

This seems like a winning idea to me.

> Basically, for SCSI disks, using for example 8 dirty lru lists and
> the following hash: [SNIP]

But why would we ever want to use an LRU list for write-outs?
It would be much better to sort the buffers in the order they're
occupying on the disk, that'll give the lower layers a better
chance of doing some I/O clustering and will reduce search times,
improve throughput, etc...

We can always free the clean buffers in LRU order later on.

Rik -- Open Source: you deserve to be in control of your data.
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