While the patent may be annoying, in practice there are a number of other cache replacement algorithms and mechanisms that are just as effective as ARC. The tradeoffs inherent in cache replacement algorithms means there are numerous ways of achieving approximately equivalent results. ARC is not a globally optimal design or anything like that.
In that sense, the patent is kind of worthless. Anyone that knows what they are doing can design around it with no loss of functionality or efficiency. A lot of sophisticated systems end up designing custom algorithms tuned for the use case anyway.
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While the patent may be annoying, in practice there are a number of other cache replacement algorithms and mechanisms that are just as effective as ARC. The tradeoffs inherent in cache replacement algorithms means there are numerous ways of achieving approximately equivalent results. ARC is not a globally optimal design or anything like that.
In that sense, the patent is kind of worthless. Anyone that knows what they are doing can design around it with no loss of functionality or efficiency. A lot of sophisticated systems end up designing custom algorithms tuned for the use case anyway.