On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 08:19:14AM +0000, Johannes Thumshirn wrote: > On 11/02/2020 02:05, Matthew Wilcox wrote: > > even though I'm pretty sure we're not going to readahead more than 2^32 > > pages ever. > > And 640K is more memory than anyone will ever need on a computer *scnr* Sure, but bandwidth just isn't increasing quickly enough to have this make sense. 2^32 pages even on our smallest page size machines is 16GB. Right now, we cap readahead at just 256kB. If we did try to readahead 16GB, we'd be occupying a PCIe gen4 x4 drive for two seconds, just satisfying this one readahead. PCIe has historically doubled in bandwidth every three years or so, so to get this down to something reasonable like a hundredth of a second, we're looking at PCIe gen12 in twenty years or so. And I bet we still won't do it (also, I doubt PCIe will continue doubling bandwidth every three years). And Linus has forbidden individual IOs over 2GB anyway, so not happening until he's forced to see the error of his ways ;-)
