09 Jan, 2006

1 commit

  • 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
    Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds

    Andrew Morton