On Thursday 11 January 2007 16:50, Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Thu, 11 Jan 2007, Nick Piggin wrote: > > > > Speaking of which, why did we obsolete raw devices? And/or why not just > > go with a minimal O_DIRECT on block device support? Not a rhetorical > > question -- I wasn't involved in the discussions when they happened, so > > I would be interested. > > Lots of people want to put their databases in a file. Partitions really > weren't nearly flexible enough. So the whole raw device or O_DIRECT just > to the block device thing isn't really helping any. > > > O_DIRECT is still crazily racy versus pagecache operations. > > Yes. O_DIRECT is really fundamentally broken. There's just no way to fix > it sanely. Except by teaching people not to use it, and making the normal > paths fast enough (and that _includes_ doing things like dropping caches > more aggressively, but it probably would include more work on the device > queue merging stuff etc etc).
What will happen if we just make open ignore O_DIRECT? ;) And then anyone who feels sad about is advised to do it like described here: http://lkml.org/lkml/2002/5/11/58 -- vda - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
