Re: userspace pagecache management tool

[Andrew Morton]

On Sat, 03 Mar 2007 15:40:42 -0500 Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Andrew Morton wrote:
> 
> > It is to address the "waah, backups fill my memory with pagecache" and the
> > "waah, updatedb swapped everything out" and the "waah, copying a DVD
> > gobbled all my memory" problems.
> 
> By removing pressure from the page cache, you'll only allow updatedb
> to grow the inode and dentry caches larger than before.

Well duh.

That's a two-order-of-magnitude lesser problem and only affects one of many
problematic workloads.


> I am sick and tired of the "this is hard, let userspace do it" attitude.

Anything you try to do in-kernel will catastrophically screw up some
workloads.  You don't have a chance of getting this right.

You are the kernel.  The user just read an entire kernel tree.  You face a
binary decision: do you cache that tree or do you not?  Your time starts
now.  What is your answer?
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