[PATCH] drop-pagecache
Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches. When written to, this will cause the kernel to
discard as much pagecache and/or reclaimable slab objects as it can. THis
operation requires root permissions.
It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first.
Caveats:
a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time.
b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through
so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis.
This is a debugging feature: useful for getting consistent results between
filesystem benchmarks. We could possibly put it under a config option, but
it's less than 300 bytes.
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
diff --git a/include/linux/sysctl.h b/include/linux/sysctl.h
index a9b80fc..4cd267f 100644
--- a/include/linux/sysctl.h
+++ b/include/linux/sysctl.h
@@ -180,6 +180,7 @@
VM_VFS_CACHE_PRESSURE=26, /* dcache/icache reclaim pressure */
VM_LEGACY_VA_LAYOUT=27, /* legacy/compatibility virtual address space layout */
VM_SWAP_TOKEN_TIMEOUT=28, /* default time for token time out */
+ VM_DROP_PAGECACHE=29, /* int: nuke lots of pagecache */
};