Subject: re: make vnodes freeable
To: Simon Burge <simonb@wasabisystems.com>
From: matthew green <mrg@eterna.com.au>
List: tech-kern
Date: 07/04/2003 04:52:41
   
   > hi,
   > 
   > following patch is to make vnodes freeable.
   > i.e. you can decrease kern.maxvnodes.
   
   I wonder if this can be made optional?  For systems that never plan to
   decrease kern.maxvnodes and have this set to a large value, it's a fair
   chunk of kernel memory tied up that'll never be used.  Of course, this
   will cause problems for kmem grovellers that use 'struct vnode' and
   'struct nameicache' (at least fstat, maybe others).
   
   I guess it's a big step to go to a totally dynamically sized vnode
   cache?  Ie, one that varies it's own size without manual intervention?


to be honest, i'm wondering what the real users of this are?
when is this actually something you'd want to do?  the only
cases i can think of are extreme and even then i can't think
of a *good* reason for it...



.mrg.