[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>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
index 2f1aae32a5d9..89ba1a42a17d 100644
--- a/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
+++ b/Documentation/sysctl/vm.txt
@@ -26,12 +26,13 @@ Currently, these files are in /proc/sys/vm:
 - min_free_kbytes
 - laptop_mode
 - block_dump
+- drop-caches
 
 ==============================================================
 
 dirty_ratio, dirty_background_ratio, dirty_expire_centisecs,
 dirty_writeback_centisecs, vfs_cache_pressure, laptop_mode,
-block_dump, swap_token_timeout:
+block_dump, swap_token_timeout, drop-caches:
 
 See Documentation/filesystems/proc.txt