mm: fadvise: document the fadvise(FADV_DONTNEED) behaviour for partial pages

A random seek IO benchmark appeared to regress because of a change to
readahead but the real problem was the benchmark.  To ensure the IO
request accesssed disk, it used fadvise(FADV_DONTNEED) on a block boundary
(512K) but the hint is ignored by the kernel.  This is correct but not
necessarily obvious behaviour.  As much as I dislike comment patches, the
explanation for this behaviour predates current git history.  Clarify why
it behaves like this in case someone "fixes" fadvise or readahead for the
wrong reasons.

Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Michael Kerrisk <mtk.manpages@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

diff --git a/mm/fadvise.c b/mm/fadvise.c
index 3bcfd81..2ad7adf 100644 (file)
--- a/mm/fadvise.c
+++ b/mm/fadvise.c
@@ -117,7 +117,11 @@ SYSCALL_DEFINE4(fadvise64_64, int, fd, loff_t, offset, loff_t, len, int, advice)
                        __filemap_fdatawrite_range(mapping, offset, endbyte,
                                                   WB_SYNC_NONE);
 
-               /* First and last FULL page! */
+               /*
+                * First and last FULL page! Partial pages are deliberately
+                * preserved on the expectation that it is better to preserve
+                * needed memory than to discard unneeded memory.
+                */
                start_index = (offset+(PAGE_CACHE_SIZE-1)) >> PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT;
                end_index = (endbyte >> PAGE_CACHE_SHIFT);