Re: [-mm PATCH] Memory controller improve user interface

From: Balbir Singh
Date: Wed Aug 29 2007 - 18:45:57 EST


Dave Hansen wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-08-30 at 03:57 +0530, Balbir Singh wrote:
>> True, mmap() is a good example of such an interface for developers, I
>> am not sure about system admins though.
>>
>> To quote Andrew
>> <quote>
>> Reporting tools could run getpagesize() and do the arithmetic, but we
>> generally try to avoid exposing PAGE_SIZE, HZ, etc to userspace in this
>> manner.
>> </quote>
>
> Well, rounding to PAGE_SIZE exposes PAGE_SIZE as well, just in a
> non-intuitive fashion. :)
>

Agreed, but the user might choose to ignore it altogether.

> If we're going to modify what the user specifies, we should probably at
> least mandate that writes are only a "suggestion" and users must read
> back the value to ensure what actually got committed.
>

Agreed, excellent suggestion!

> If we're going to round in any direction, shouldn't we round up? If a
> user specifies 4097 bytes and uses two pages, we don't want to complain
> when they hit that second page.
>

Absolutely, I used rounding to mean round up, truncation for rounding down.

--
Warm Regards,
Balbir Singh
Linux Technology Center
IBM, ISTL
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/