Laptop mode was introduced to save battery, by delaying and consolidating
writes and thereby maximize the time rotating hard drives wouldn't have to
spin.
Luckily, rotating hard drives, with their high spin-up times and power
draw, are a thing of the past for battery-powered devices. Reclaim has
also since changed to not write single filesystem pages anymore, and
regular filesystem writeback is lumpy by design.
The juice doesn't appear worth the squeeze anymore. The footprint of the
feature is small, but nevertheless it's a complicating factor in mm,
block, filesystems. Developers don't think about it, and it likely hasn't
been tested with new reclaim and writeback changes in years.
Let's sunset it. Keep the sysctl with a deprecation warning around for a
few more cycles, but remove all functionality behind it.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix Documentation/admin-guide/laptops/index.rst]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20251216185201.GH905277@cmpxchg.org
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Suggested-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Reviewed-by: Shakeel Butt <shakeel.butt@linux.dev>
Acked-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.com>
Cc: Deepanshu Kartikey <kartikey406@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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