[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/kernel/sysctl.c b/kernel/sysctl.c
index a85047b..8dcf6fd 100644
--- a/kernel/sysctl.c
+++ b/kernel/sysctl.c
@@ -68,6 +68,7 @@
extern int printk_ratelimit_jiffies;
extern int printk_ratelimit_burst;
extern int pid_max_min, pid_max_max;
+extern int sysctl_drop_caches;
#if defined(CONFIG_X86_LOCAL_APIC) && defined(CONFIG_X86)
int unknown_nmi_panic;
@@ -775,6 +776,15 @@
.strategy = &sysctl_intvec,
},
{
+ .ctl_name = VM_DROP_PAGECACHE,
+ .procname = "drop_caches",
+ .data = &sysctl_drop_caches,
+ .maxlen = sizeof(int),
+ .mode = 0644,
+ .proc_handler = drop_caches_sysctl_handler,
+ .strategy = &sysctl_intvec,
+ },
+ {
.ctl_name = VM_MIN_FREE_KBYTES,
.procname = "min_free_kbytes",
.data = &min_free_kbytes,