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!