Major Rewrite Of Linux's FS-Cache / CacheFiles So It's Smaller & Simpler

As part of David Howells of Red Hat long-term work on improving the caching code used by network file-systems, he today posted a big patch series rewriting the fscache and cachefiles code as the latest significant step on that adventure.

Howells posted a set of 64 patches for rewriting the kernel's fscache and cachefiles code. Linux's fsache is a general purpose cache used by network file-systems while cachefiles is for providing a caching back-end for mounted local file-systems. The Red Hat engineer has been working on this rewrite for more than the past year.

As for the motivation of this major rewrite to FS-Cache and CacheFiles, Howells explained, "significantly simplifying the code compared to what's upstream, removing the complex operation scheduling and object state machine in favour of something much smaller and simpler."

The fscache and cachefiles driver code is almost entirely new as well as being designed to be more future-proof on top of the immediate efficiency and simplicity gains. But there are some issues still to work through as mentioned in the patch email.

See this patch series if the topic interests you or are a big user of Linux network file-systems.