kernel work week of 3-Feb-2010 HEADS UP

[Matthew Dillon]

:I could readily envision using a 15k RPM scsi/sas spinny disk for
:this too.  Cool thinking Matt.
:
:-michael

    Yes.  We would need a slightly different algorithm to make it
    efficient but it is certainly within the bounds of what we can
    do in the first iteration.  For this case instead of giving the
    swap absolute priority over the filesystem when the data is present
    in both we would instead want to monitor the swap drive and
    balance the load between the two.

    The flexibility would be the same though... the 15K RPM swap drive
    would not be treated as an integrated part of any filesystem so it
    would be a (trivially) throw-away component.

    --

    Hmm.  NFS would benefit too.  Normally when you have a large NFS server
    (say a NetApp filer) and lots of clients you have load issues on the
    server.  But with a SSD or 15K rpm cache on each client the load on
    the server would be greatly reduced once their data set stabilized.
    That would make the use of a centralized file server for data serving
    more practical.  The central server could focus on providing redundancy
    instead of performance while each throw-away client focused on
    performance.

					-Matt
					Matthew Dillon 
					<dillon at backplane.com>