From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 17:11:57 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 17:11:47 -0400 Received: from user-vc8ftn3.biz.mindspring.com ([216.135.246.227]:47113 "EHLO mail.ivivity.com") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 22 May 2001 17:11:44 -0400 Message-ID: <25369470B6F0D41194820002B328BDD2071790@ATLOPS> From: Bharath Madhavan To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Speeding up VFS using HW assist Date: Tue, 22 May 2001 17:11:37 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2448.0) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Hello All, I will be using Linux as the OS for an embedded system. I was looking into 2.4.4 kernel code and saw the dcache implementation in VFS which is pretty neat and fast by itself. My question is, will I gain any considerable efficiency in file system access if I can move this "pathname -> inode" lookup into some proprietery HW assist mechanism and take out the dcache hashing and "cached_lookup" function. How good(bad) was it before the dcache implementation and in which release was dcache feature added (was it only after 2.2.x release). Did we get 2-3 times better performance with dcache? (if not, how much?) Can anyone suggest any other place in the file system (VFS and EXT2) where we can use any HW assist (let us say FPGA implementing search, lookup, etc.) to speed up file-system access (both for opening and read/write) Would tweaking the buffer cache and page cache sizes make a considerable effect on efficiency? Any other suggestions? Thanks a lot, Bharath