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This patchset introduces cleancache, an optional new feature exposed
by the VFS layer that potentially dramatically increases page cache
effectiveness for many workloads in many environments at a negligible
cost. It does this by providing an interface to transcendent memory,
which is memory/storage that is not otherwise visible to and/or directly
addressable by the kernel.
Instead of being discarded, hooks in the reclaim code "put" clean
pages to cleancache. Filesystems that "opt-in" may "get" pages
from cleancache that were previously put, but pages in cleancache are
"ephemeral", meaning they may disappear at any time. And the size
of cleancache is entirely dynamic and unknowable to the kernel.
Filesystems currently supported by this patchset include ext3, ext4,
btrfs, and ocfs2. Other filesystems (especially those built entirely
on VFS) should be easy to add, but should first be thoroughly tested to
ensure coherency.
Details and a FAQ are provided in Documentation/vm/cleancache.txt
This first patch of eight in this cleancache series only adds two
new documentation files.
[v8: minor documentation changes by author]
[v3: akpm@linux-foundation.org: document sysfs API]
[v3: hch@infradead.org: move detailed description to Documentation/vm]
Signed-off-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
Reviewed-by: Jeremy Fitzhardinge <jeremy@goop.org>
Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Acked-by: Randy Dunlap <randy.dunlap@oracle.com>
Cc: Al Viro <viro@ZenIV.linux.org.uk>
Cc: Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>
Cc: Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Cc: Rik Van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Jan Beulich <JBeulich@novell.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <chris.mason@oracle.com>
Cc: Andreas Dilger <adilger@sun.com>
Cc: Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>
Cc: Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>
Cc: Joel Becker <joel.becker@oracle.com>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
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