On Sun, 24 Sep 2000, Linus Torvalds wrote:

I'm not claiming that the buffer cache accesses would go away - I'm just
saying that the unbalanced "only buffer cache" case should go away,
because things like "find" and friends will still cause mostly page cache
activity.

(Considering the size of the inode on ext2, I don't know how true this is,
I have to admit. It might still be quite biased towards the buffer cache,
and as such the additional page cache pressure might not be enough to
really cause any major shift in balancing).

Hrrrmmm... You know, since we don't have to associate struct inode with every
address space and inode table _is_ a linear array, after all... We
might put it into pagecache too. Very few places access the on-disk
inode, so it's not too horrible. All we need is readpage() and that's
very easy, considering the fact that allocation is static. prepare_write()
and commit_write() may be NULL for all I care and writepage() will
be easy too - no holes, no allocation, no nothing. Looks like we need to deal
with ext2_update_inode(), ext2_read_inode() and that's it. Even less
intrusive than directory stuff...

Comments?

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