Ridiculous idea: Cache as ramdisk?

Hiten Pandya hmp at backplane.com
Tue Sep 23 12:17:20 PDT 2003


Matthew Dillon wrote:
>
>	[ ... great explanations snipped 8-) ... ]
>
    The MFS filesystem comes fairly close to doing this already since
    its backing store is simply the memory associated with a process, but
    it has the disadvantage of causing data to be stored in memory twice
    (once in the VM / buffer cache, once in the MFS's procs memory space).
    Despite the duplication of data, the fact that MFS filesystems do not
    automaticaly flush data to a physical storage device has proven to be
    a huge performance advantage over the years.
    So, in short, we already have the pieces, we just have to get them to
    fit together in a reasonable way.
	Well, the problem about storing data twice will only affect us
	as long as we don't have a Slab Cache, [Bonwick94, Bonwick2001]
	but once that is in place, we will be much better off, memory
	allocation wise...
	Regards,

--
Hiten Pandya
hmp at xxxxxxxxxxxxx





More information about the Kernel mailing list