On Thu, 31 Mar 2011 08:56:43 +0800 Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > This is a big change, and it wasn't even changelogged. It's > > potentially a tremendous increase in the expense of a read from > > /proc/meminfo, which is a file that lots of tools will be polling. > > Many of those tools we don't even know about or have access to. > Assume we don't read /proc/meminfo too often. That's a poor assumption. top(1) and vmstat(8) read it, for a start. There will be zillions of locally-developed monitoring tools which read meminfo. Now, it could be that something under meminfo reads _already_ does a massive walk across all CPUs. If so then we'll have already trained people to avoid reading /proc/meminfo and this change might be acceptable. But if this isn't the case then it's quite likely that this change will hurt some people quite a lot. And, unfortunately, the sort of people who we will hurt tend to be people who don't run our stuff until a long time (years) after we wrote it. By which time it's going to be quite expensive to get a fix down the chain and into their hands. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxx For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>