IDE and locking

[P]

Hi,

I'm working on an embedded system here that
basically counts ethernet packets. I'm using
2.4.20 and I'm noticing that when files are
read from the compact flash (ext2), ethernet
packets are being dropped.

So to work around the problem, I'm precaching
all the files (12MB) at boot like:
find / -type f | while read file; do dd if=$file of=/dev/null; done

So questions.

1. Is this due to the BKL around the IDE subsystem?
2. Are writes as susceptible as reads to the problem?
   I'm guessing if the compact flash had a write cache
   buffer I would be OK as I only write max 2MB at a time?
3. There was talk about removing the BKL in 2.6 with
   reference to:
   http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=8875
   Has this work been included?
4. Is there a max number of files that can be cached by linux?
5. Will the files be removed at any stage from the cache
   if there is no memory pressure?
6. Can I reserve memory for the file cache?

cheers.
--
PÃdraig Brady - http://www.pixelbeat.org

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