Re: userspace pagecache management tool

[Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>]

On Mon, 05 Mar 2007 11:02:43 +0000 Pádraig Brady <P@draigBrady.com> wrote:

> Andrew Morton wrote:
> > I've uploaded to http://userweb.kernel.org/~akpm/pagecache-management/ a
> > little tool which permits the management of the pagecache usage of
> > arbitrary applications.  Effectively it prevents the targetted application
> > from using any pagecache at all.
> 
> Cool, Kinda like noca?
> http://kernel.umbrella.ro/vm/

yup, same concept.

> Though I could easily read your code,
> but couldn't immediately figure out what noca was doing.
> 
> I used posix_fadvise in an app I did recently:
> http://www.pixelbeat.org/programs/dvd-vr/
> There is a stream_data() func there that does:
> 
> read(src)
> write(dst)
> posix_fadvise(src)
> posix_fadvise(dst)
> 
> for performance I found I needed to do it in that order
> so that any readahead done with the read(src)
> was not thrown away by the posix_fadvise(src).
> In addition to the order, one must be careful
> to throw away only what you've actually written.
> 
> I'm not sure your lib gives enough control over this,
> as you essentially do:
> 
> posix_fadvise(src)
> read(src)
> posix_fadvise(dst)
> write(dst)

That could be so - it's just a demo.  But readahead should be OK - I only
invalidate from start-of-file up to current-offset-minus-pagesize.  So the
cache at and ahead of the linear reader is undisturbed.