mm: fadvise: document the fadvise(FADV_DONTNEED) behaviour for partial pages
A random seek IO benchmark appeared to regress because of a change to
readahead but the real problem was the benchmark. To ensure the IO
request accesssed disk, it used fadvise(FADV_DONTNEED) on a block boundary
(512K) but the hint is ignored by the kernel. This is correct but not
necessarily obvious behaviour. As much as I dislike comment patches, the
explanation for this behaviour predates current git history. Clarify why
it behaves like this in case someone "fixes" fadvise or readahead for the
wrong reasons.
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
diff --git a/mm/fadvise.c b/mm/fadvise.c
index 3bcfd81d..2ad7adf 100644
--- a/mm/fadvise.c
+++ b/mm/fadvise.c
@@ -117,7 +117,11 @@
__filemap_fdatawrite_range(mapping, offset, endbyte,
WB_SYNC_NONE);
- /* First and last FULL page! */
+ /*
+ * First and last FULL page! Partial pages are deliberately
+ * preserved on the expectation that it is better to preserve
+ * needed memory than to discard unneeded memory.
+ */
start_index = (offset+(PAGE_CACHE_SIZE-1)) >> PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT;
end_index = (endbyte >> PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT);