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>
9d0243bca3