[compsciphd]

it might be possible to create an LD_PRELOAD'd library that wraps open type syscalls (i.e. those that return an fd, might just be open, haven't kept up with all of linux syscalls) and that based on a config file calls fadvise on those fd's that correspond to specific files/paths on disk). Won't help for statically linked binaries or those that call syscalls directly without glibc's shims, but that should be a small number of programs.

heck, if I were still a phd student, I'd want to run performance numbers on this in many different scenarios and see how performance behaves. feel like there could be a paper here.

[the8472]

https://github.com/Feh/nocache

[compsciphd]

@the8472, hah, so someone thought of the same thing. I'd try to leverage /etc/ld.so.preload with a config file as a more transparent solution, but your link proves the point that its possible.

[the8472]

You probably don't want it in ld preload globally because it would also clobber the page cache in processes that do benefit from it.

And if you only do it in a container you can also limit the page cache size of the container to avoid impacting the other workloads.

[compsciphd]

hence why I said a config file based (i.e. include the path that stores one's media, won't matter what program you use to play it), but yes, page cache does play a role (but hence why I also said it be interesting to explore how different applications behave with and without it and how that impacts other system performance)

i.e. I really wonder for desktop workloads if one only caches "executable" data, how would that negatively impact perceived performance. I'd imagine it have some impact, but I'd be interested in seeing it quantified.