fadvise syscall?

Jeff Garzik
2002-03-17T08:40:04Z

Has anyone ever done an madvise(2)-type syscall for file descriptors?
(or does the capability exist and I'm missing it?)

I was thinking, in playing around with stuff like cp(1) I've found that
standard read(2) and write(2) of a 4-8K buffer is the fastest solution
overall, in addition to providing the useful side effect of better error
reporting, such as ENOSPC report. Better error reporting than the
alternative I see anyway, mmap(2).

So... we have madvise, why not fadvise? I would love the capability for
applications to provide hints to the OS like madvise, but for file
descriptors...

Jeff