There is a program in SLES8 (was also in SLES7) called flushb that appears to be useful for flushing the memory buffers on a per disk device basis. There is precious little documentation on this particular tidbit out there, however, I did find this link where the sources is posted: http://seclists.org/linux-kernel/2001/Feb/3183.html - If this is useful for flushing the disk buffers back to their devices, does anyone more knowledgeable than I see a way to modify this utility to also flush the cache?
Regardless of that caveat, Seeing how I have guests spinning that sometime gather 100+ megs of buffer if left to their own recognisance. I was wondering if there was any gotchas anyone was aware of in using a simple script to call this against the mounted devices on a system to flush the buffers periodically. I tested somethign crude like this: #!/bin/sh # Flush the buffers disk devices echo "Buffers before flush" cat /proc/meminfo | grep Buffers /usr/sbin/flushb /dev/dasdb1 /usr/sbin/flushb /dev/dasdc1 /usr/sbin/flushb /dev/dasdd1 /usr/sbin/flushb /dev/dasde1 echo "Buffers after flush" cat /proc/meminfo | grep Buffers exit Any thoughts/comments?. Seems to me that there is a slim possibility that this code might be able to be modified to help with the vexing problem of cachienss. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
