Subject: Re: mmap vs. O_DIRECT
From: Robert Love <rml@novell.com>
To: Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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Date: Thu, 11 Nov 2004 12:13:39 -0500
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On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 10:41 -0500, Robert Love wrote:

> There is a difference between being synchronous and not going through
> the page cache, although in Linux we don't really have the distinction.

Rereading this, I should clarify.  We definitely have the distinction.

In the case of direct I/O, you get synchronousness, no page caching, and
no use of buffers.  In my statement, I meant that you cannot separate
the "no page cache" from the "synchronousness" attribute.

But you can get synchronous I/O and still get the page cache, ala
O_SYNC.

The closest you can come to normal I/O without the page cache is by
doing posix_fadvise() to prune your cache pages after you touch them.
That is definitely not what you want.

	Robert Love


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