Re: Disabling file system caching

["Balbir" <balbir@ti.com>]

Not sure if posting to the newsgroup linux.kernel sends
it to the mailing list too.

"Balbir Singh" <balbir_soni@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:b0g6q2$lfq$1@tilde.itg.ti.com...
> "Rik van Riel" <riel@conectiva.com.br> wrote in message
> news:20030120011009$2d98@gated-at.bofh.it...
> > On Sun, 19 Jan 2003, Jean-Eric Cuendet wrote:
> >
> > > Is it possible to disable file caching for a given partition or mount?
> >
> > No, if you do that mmap(), read(), write() etc. would be impossible.
> >
> > > Or at least to limit it at a certain quantity of memory?
> >
> > Not yet.  I'm thinking of implementing something like this
> > for the next version of -rmap (reclaim only from the cache
> > if the cache occupies more than a certain fraction of ram).
>

I think that this feature is very important. In an embedded system
using an NFS root filesystem, we found that the file cache
would take a lot of memory and all insmods would fail. This is
especially true when the system boots up and looks for /lib/modules.

I think it should be possible to modify the slab allocator to
implement a memory pool. We could add a flag which would prevent
the slab from growing beyond its initial size.

This approach would work only if the cache is allocated by
using the slab allocator.

Balbir