On Tue Nov 16, 2021 at 10:37 PM CET, Andrew Morton wrote:

We're never going to get this right, are we? The only person who can
decide on a system's appropriate setting is the operator of that
system. Haphazardly increasing the limit every few years mainly
reduces incentive for people to get this right.

And people who test their software on 5.17 kernels will later find that
it doesn't work on 5.16 and earlier, so they still need to tell their
users to configure their systems appropriately. Until 5.16 is
obsolete, by which time we're looking at increasing the default again.

I don't see how this change gets us closer to the desired state:
getting distros and their users to configure their systems
appropriately.

Perfect is the enemy of good. This is a very simple change we can make
to improve the status quo, and I think that's worth doing. I do not have
time to develop a more sophisticated solution which steers the defaults
based on memory present, and I definitely don't have the time to
petition every distro to configure a better default for their particular
needs. This is the easiest way to get broad adoption for a better
default.