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    SubjectRe: [PATCH] add some drop_caches documentation and info messsge
    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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