NeilBrown [off-list ref] wrote:

When a md array has been idle (no writes) for 20msecs it is marked as
'clean'.  This delay turns out to be too short for some real
workloads.  So increase it to 200msec (the time to update the metadata
should be a tiny fraction of that) and make it sysfs-configurable.


...

+   safe_mode_delay
+     When an md array has seen no write requests for a certain period
+     of time, it will be marked as 'clean'.  When another write
+     request arrive, the array is marked as 'dirty' before the write
+     commenses.  This is known as 'safe_mode'.
+     The 'certain period' is controlled by this file which stores the
+     period as a number of seconds.  The default is 200msec (0.200).
+     Writing a value of 0 disables safemode.
+

Why not make the units milliseconds?  Rename this to safe_mode_delay_msecs
to remove any doubt.

+static ssize_t
+safe_delay_store(mddev_t *mddev, const char *cbuf, size_t len)
+{
+	int scale=1;
+	int dot=0;
+	int i;
+	unsigned long msec;
+	char buf[30];
+	char *e;
+	/* remove a period, and count digits after it */
+	if (len >= sizeof(buf))
+		return -EINVAL;
+	strlcpy(buf, cbuf, len);
+	buf[len] = 0;
+	for (i=0; i<len; i++) {
+		if (dot) {
+			if (isdigit(buf[i])) {
+				buf[i-1] = buf[i];
+				scale *= 10;
+			}
+			buf[i] = 0;
+		} else if (buf[i] == '.') {
+			dot=1;
+			buf[i] = 0;
+		}
+	}
+	msec = simple_strtoul(buf, &e, 10);
+	if (e == buf || (*e && *e != '\n'))
+		return -EINVAL;
+	msec = (msec * 1000) / scale;
+	if (msec == 0)
+		mddev->safemode_delay = 0;
+	else {
+		mddev->safemode_delay = (msec*HZ)/1000;
+		if (mddev->safemode_delay == 0)
+			mddev->safemode_delay = 1;
+	}
+	return len;

And most of that goes away.