linux/fs/drop_caches.c
Andrew Morton 9d0243bca3 [PATCH] drop-pagecache
Add /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches.  When written to, this will cause the kernel to
discard as much pagecache and/or reclaimable slab objects as it can.  THis
operation requires root permissions.

It won't drop dirty data, so the user should run `sync' first.

Caveats:

a) Holds inode_lock for exorbitant amounts of time.

b) Needs to be taught about NUMA nodes: propagate these all the way through
   so the discarding can be controlled on a per-node basis.

This is a debugging feature: useful for getting consistent results between
filesystem benchmarks.  We could possibly put it under a config option, but
it's less than 300 bytes.

Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
2006-01-08 20:12:40 -08:00

69 lines
1.4 KiB
C

/*
* Implement the manual drop-all-pagecache function
*/
#include <linux/kernel.h>
#include <linux/mm.h>
#include <linux/fs.h>
#include <linux/writeback.h>
#include <linux/sysctl.h>
#include <linux/gfp.h>
/* A global variable is a bit ugly, but it keeps the code simple */
int sysctl_drop_caches;
static void drop_pagecache_sb(struct super_block *sb)
{
struct inode *inode;
spin_lock(&inode_lock);
list_for_each_entry(inode, &sb->s_inodes, i_sb_list) {
if (inode->i_state & (I_FREEING|I_WILL_FREE))
continue;
invalidate_inode_pages(inode->i_mapping);
}
spin_unlock(&inode_lock);
}
void drop_pagecache(void)
{
struct super_block *sb;
spin_lock(&sb_lock);
restart:
list_for_each_entry(sb, &super_blocks, s_list) {
sb->s_count++;
spin_unlock(&sb_lock);
down_read(&sb->s_umount);
if (sb->s_root)
drop_pagecache_sb(sb);
up_read(&sb->s_umount);
spin_lock(&sb_lock);
if (__put_super_and_need_restart(sb))
goto restart;
}
spin_unlock(&sb_lock);
}
void drop_slab(void)
{
int nr_objects;
do {
nr_objects = shrink_slab(1000, GFP_KERNEL, 1000);
} while (nr_objects > 10);
}
int drop_caches_sysctl_handler(ctl_table *table, int write,
struct file *file, void __user *buffer, size_t *length, loff_t *ppos)
{
proc_dointvec_minmax(table, write, file, buffer, length, ppos);
if (write) {
if (sysctl_drop_caches & 1)
drop_pagecache();
if (sysctl_drop_caches & 2)
drop_slab();
}
return 0;
}