Cong> It introduces a new fcntl command  F_DROP_CACHES to drop
Cong> file caches of a specific file. The reason is that currently
Cong> we only have a system-wide drop caches interface, it could
Cong> cause system-wide performance down if we drop all page caches
Cong> when we actually want to drop the caches of some huge file.

file_drop_caches(filp, arg);

void file_drop_caches(struct file *filp, unsigned long which);

$ dd if=ifile iflag=nocache count=0

$ dd of=ofile oflag=nocache conv=notrunc,fdatasync count=0

$ dd if=ifile iflag=nocache skip=10 count=10 of=/dev/null

$ dd if=ifile of=ofile iflag=nocache oflag=nocache

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=sample.txt bs=100M count=1

$ sudo fatrace | grep sample.txt

$ top

$ cat sample.txt > /dev/null

$ sudo dd of=/home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt
    oflag=nocache conv=notrunc,fdatasync count=0

$ dd if=/dev/urandom of=sample.txt bs=100M count=1
1+0 records in
1+0 records out
104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 7.37996 s, 14.2 MB/s

$ ls -l sample.txt
-rw-rw-r--. 1 saml saml 104857600 Oct 17 22:54 sample.txt

$ top
...
KiB Mem:   7968336 total,  6900956 used,  1067380 free,   267080 buffers
...

$ sudo fatrace | grep sample.txt

$ cat sample.txt > /dev/null

KiB Mem:   7968336 total,  7011896 used,   956440 free,   267336 buffers

cat(25940): R /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt
cat(25940): R /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt
cat(25940): RC /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt

$ sudo dd of=/home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt
    oflag=nocache conv=notrunc,fdatasync count=0

dd(26229): O /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt
dd(26229): CW /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt

KiB Mem:   7968336 total,  6908364 used,  1059972 free,   267364 buffers

$ sudo pyadvise --help
Usage:
    pyadvise [options] [FILE]..

Options:
  -h, --help        show this help message and exit
  -w, --willneed    The specified files will be accessed in the near future
  -s, --sequential  The application expects to access the specified files
                    sequentially (with lower offsets read before higher ones)
  -d, --dontneed    The specified files will not be accessed in the near
                    future
  -r, --random      The specified files will be accessed in random order
  -o, --noreuse     The specified files will be accessed only once. Under
                    Linux, this operation is a no-op; see contrib/copyfileobj-
                    fadvise.py in the python-fadvise source tree for an
                    example on how to achieve approximately the same effect
  -n, --normal      Indicates that the application has no advice to give about
                    its access pattern for the specified files. If no advice
                    is given for an open file, this is the default assumption
  -v, --verbose     Explain what is being done

$ pyadvise -d /home/saml/tst/162600/sample.txt