drop_caches: add some documentation and info message

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence and a load of blog posts
suggesting that using "drop_caches" periodically keeps your system
running in "tip top shape".  Perhaps adding some kernel documentation
will increase the amount of accurate data on its use.

If we are not shrinking caches effectively, then we have real bugs.
Using drop_caches will simply mask the bugs and make them harder to
find, but certainly does not fix them, nor is it an appropriate
"workaround" to limit the size of the caches.  On the contrary, there
have been bug reports on issues that turned out to be misguided use of
cache dropping.

Dropping caches is a very drastic and disruptive operation that is good
for debugging and running tests, but if it creates bug reports from
production use, kernel developers should be aware of its use.

Add a bit more documentation about it, a syslog message to track down
abusers, and vmstat drop counters to help analyze problem reports.

[akpm@linux-foundation.org: checkpatch fixes]
[hannes@cmpxchg.org: add runtime suppression control]
Signed-off-by: Dave Hansen <dave@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Signed-off-by: Michal Hocko <mhocko@suse.cz>
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Acked-by: KAMEZAWA Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu@jp.fujitsu.com>
Signed-off-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 2 deletions

diff --git a/fs/drop_caches.c b/fs/drop_caches.c
index 9fd702f5bfb2..9280202e488c 100644
--- a/fs/drop_caches.c
+++ b/fs/drop_caches.c
@@ -59,10 +59,22 @@ int drop_caches_sysctl_handler(ctl_table *table, int write,
 	if (ret)
 		return ret;
 	if (write) {
-		if (sysctl_drop_caches & 1)
+		static int stfu;
+
+		if (sysctl_drop_caches & 1) {
 			iterate_supers(drop_pagecache_sb, NULL);
-		if (sysctl_drop_caches & 2)
+			count_vm_event(DROP_PAGECACHE);
+		}
+		if (sysctl_drop_caches & 2) {
 			drop_slab();
+			count_vm_event(DROP_SLAB);
+		}
+		if (!stfu) {
+			pr_info("%s (%d): drop_caches: %d\n",
+				current->comm, task_pid_nr(current),
+				sysctl_drop_caches);
+		}
+		stfu |= sysctl_drop_caches & 4;
 	}
 	return 0;
 }