Hi!
> > > hmpf. This patch worries me. If there are people out there who are
> > > regularly using drop_caches because the VM sucks, it seems pretty
> > > obnoxious of us to go dumping stuff into their syslog. What are they
> > > supposed to do? Stop using drop_caches?
> >
> > People use drop_caches because they _think_ the VM sucks, or they
> > _think_ they're "tuning" their system. _They_ are supposed to stop
> > using drop_caches. :)
>
> Well who knows. Could be that people's vm *does* suck. Or they have
> some particularly peculiar worklosd or requirement[*]. Or their VM
> *used* to suck, and the drop_caches is not really needed any more but
> it's there in vendor-provided code and they can't practically prevent
> it.
Or they have ipw wifi that does order 5 allocation :-).
I seen drop_caches used in some android code, as part of SD card handling IIRC.
> > What kind of interface _is_ it in the first place? Is it really a
> > production-level thing that we expect users to be poking at? Or, is it
> > a rarely-used debugging and benchmarking knob which is fair game for us
> > to tweak like this?
>
> It was a rarely-used mainly-developer-only thing which, apparently, real
> people found useful at some point in the past. Perhaps we should never
> have offered it.
And yes, documentation would be good. IIRC you claimed that
drop_caches is not safe to use year-or-so-ago, is that still true?
Pavel
--
(english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek
(cesky, pictures)
http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html
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