Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 25 Oct 2012 11:24:24 +0200 | From | Borislav Petkov <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] add some drop_caches documentation and info messsge |
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On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 08:56:45PM -0400, KOSAKI Motohiro wrote: > > That effectively means removing it from the kernel since distros ship > > with those config options off. We don't want to do that since there > > _are_ valid, occasional uses like benchmarking that we want to be > > consistent. > > Agreed. we don't want to remove valid interface never.
Ok, duly noted.
But let's discuss this a bit further. So, for the benchmarking aspect, you're either going to have to always require dmesg along with benchmarking results or /proc/vmstat, depending on where the drop_caches stats end up.
Is this how you envision it?
And then there are the VM bug cases, where you might not always get full dmesg from a panicked system. In that case, you'd want the kernel tainting thing too, so that it at least appears in the oops backtrace.
Although the tainting thing might not be enough - a user could drop_caches at some point in time and the oops happening much later could be unrelated but that can't be expressed in taint flags.
So you'd need some sort of a drop_caches counter, I'd guess. Or a last drop_caches timestamp something.
Am I understanding the intent correctly?
Thanks.
-- Regards/Gruss, Boris.
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