Caching idea

Jim Nance (jlnance@isscad.com)
Thu, 29 Jun 95 8:37:22 EDT


This is in response to a message about caching NFS file to disk that was
posted here a few days ago. Of course I deleted the message and then
decided to reply to it :-(. The basic idea was to cache NFS files to a local
disk since NFS is slow. I have also seen a suggestion to do the same for
CDROMS since they are also slow.

It occured to me yesterday that a relitivly elegant way to accomplish this
might be to change the buffer cache so that blocks which hold data from
slow devices could be made swappable. Since the buffer cache and the swap
code seem to be fairly integrated at the moment, it does not seem like this
would be a huge change, and it is certainly prettier than having each slow
device have it own cache file, and it own cache manager (and its own cache
manager bugs). Have I overlooked anything important?

Jim