[Devel] Re: Containers and /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

Dave Hansen dave at linux.vnet.ibm.com
Thu Jan 6 14:15:40 PST 2011


On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 14:08 -0800, Matt Helsley wrote:
> Is drop_caches well-defined? IOW would it be permissible to
> not actually drop all or any of the cache entries or to do nothing and
> still report success instead of, say, EPERM, to a container?

It's really just a hint or a request.  It's possible that an

	echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

returns '2' (for the two bytes written), indicating success and yet, not
a single object was freed.  There's currently no way to tell how much
work it did, or to figure out why it did a certain amount of work.

Frankly, in a container, it probably just shouldn't even show up
in /proc.

-- Dave


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