Julius Plenz – Blog

“nocache” in Debian Testing

I’m very pleased to announce that a little program of mine called nocache has officially made it into the Debian distribution and migrated to Debian testing just a few days ago.

The tool started out as a small hack that employs mmap and mincore to check which blocks of a file are already in the Linux FS cache, and uses this info in the intercepted libc’s open/close syscall wrappers and related functions in an effort to restore the cache to its pristine state after every file access.

I only wrote this tool as a little “proof of concept”, but it seems there are people out there actually using this, which is nice.

A couple of links:

My thanks go out to Dmitry who packaged and will be maintaining the tool for Debian – as well as the other people who engaged in the lively discussions in the issue tracker.

Update: Chris promptly provided an Arch Linux package, too! Thanks!

posted 2013-05-19 tagged linux and debian