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. -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>