This patch introduces a new function dm_bufio_prefetch. It prefetches
the specified range of blocks into dm-bufio cache without waiting
for i/o completion.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
The dm-bufio interface allows you to do cached I/O on devices,
holding recently-read blocks in memory and performing delayed writes.
We don't use buffer cache or page cache already present in the kernel, because:
* we need to handle block sizes larger than a page
* we can't allocate memory to perform reads or we'd have deadlocks
Currently, when a cache is required, we limit its size to a fraction of
available memory. Usage can be viewed and changed in
/sys/module/dm_bufio/parameters/ .
The first user is thin provisioning, but more dm users are planned.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
