Re: [PATCH -mm] mm: fine-grained dirty_ratio_pcm anddirty_background_ratio_pcm (v2)

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Mon Nov 10 2008 - 16:14:31 EST


On Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:58:28 +0100
Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> The current granularity of 5% of dirtyable memory for dirty pages writeback is
> too coarse for large memory machines and this will get worse as
> memory-size/disk-speed ratio continues to increase.
>
> These large writebacks can be unpleasant for desktop or latency-sensitive
> environments, where the time to complete each writeback can be perceived as a
> lack of responsiveness by the whole system.
>
> Following there's a similar solution as discussed in [1], but a little
> bit simplified in order to provide the same functionality (in particular
> to avoid backward compatibility problems) and reduce the amount of code
> needed to implement an in-kernel parser to handle percentages with
> decimals digits.
>
> The kernel provides the following parameters:
> - dirty_ratio, dirty_background_ratio in percentage (1 ... 100)
> - dirty_ratio_pcm, dirty_background_ratio_pcm in units of percent mille (1 ... 100,000)

hm, so how long until dirty_ratio_pcm becomes too coarse...

What happened to the idea of specifying these in units of kilobytes?
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