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Replacing Atime With Relatime in the Kernel
eldavojohn writes "Our friend Jeremy at the Kernal Trap has dug up some interesting criticism of atime from Linus Torvalds. As Linus submitted patches to improve relatime he noted: 'I cannot over-emphasize how much of a deal it is in practice. Atime updates are by far the biggest IO performance deficiency that Linux has today. Getting rid of atime updates would give us more everyday Linux performance than all the pagecache speedups of the past 10 years, _combined_.' And later severely beat atime about the head with a pointed stick: 'It's also perhaps the most stupid Unix design idea of all times. Unix is really nice and well done, but think about this a bit: 'For every file that is read from the disk, lets do a ... write to the disk! And, for every file that is already cached and which we read from the cache ... do a write to the disk!'" Well, I guess I can expect my Linux machine to become a little bit faster!"
My name is Ingo Molnar and you mis-attributed my quote. Prepare to die!
"You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a flame war on Kerneltrap..."
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
I agree - modifying a text file is a messy complicated business only suitable for the elite super hackers out there. It's much simpler for me to apply the patch and recompile the kernel.
I kid, I kid.
How can anyone write that with a straight face?
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'm sure it was written with a gay face.
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death