> Note that some of them are bugfixes, without them an luser can hang the
> machine for several seconds on any box with some giga of ram by simple
> reading and writing into a large enough buffer. I think we never had
> time to care merging those bits into mainline yet and this is probably
> the main reason they're not integrated but it's something that should be
> in mainline IMHO.
Or just doing a large write while doing lots of reads... my personal
nemesis is "mkisofs" for backups, which reads lots of small files and
builds a CD image, which suddenly gets discovered by the kernel and
written, seemingly in a monolythic chunk. I MAY be able to improve this
with tuning the bdflush parameters, and I tried some tentative patches
which didn't make a huge gain.
I don't know if the solution lies in forcing write to start when a certain
size of buffers are queued regardless of percentages, or in better
scheduling of reads ahead of writes, or whatever.
-- bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> CTO, TMR Associates, Inc Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.- 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/