[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, 1 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/fs/Makefile b/fs/Makefile
index 73676111ebbe..35e9aec608e4 100644
--- a/fs/Makefile
+++ b/fs/Makefile
@@ -10,7 +10,7 @@ obj-y :=	open.o read_write.o file_table.o buffer.o  bio.o super.o \
                 ioctl.o readdir.o select.o fifo.o locks.o dcache.o inode.o \
                 attr.o bad_inode.o file.o filesystems.o namespace.o aio.o \
                 seq_file.o xattr.o libfs.o fs-writeback.o mpage.o direct-io.o \
-                ioprio.o pnode.o
+                ioprio.o pnode.o drop_caches.o
 
 obj-$(CONFIG_INOTIFY)           += inotify.o
 obj-$(CONFIG_EPOLL)             += eventpoll.o