bio: a buffer cache that grows to 1/32 of RAM, looked up by hash

The cache was NBUF buffers, 1 MB, on every machine: enough for one with
tens of megabytes and nothing on one with gigabytes, which re-read the
same directory and binary blocks off the disk for every command. It
still starts as those 256 in the kernel image, and a miss with every
buffer busy now makes a new one rather than evicting, up to 1/32 of RAM
or 256 MB. Growing on demand means nothing is spent that is not used,
and binit() needs nothing from the page allocator.

Lookups go through a hash on (dev, blockno) instead of walking the LRU
list, and bflush() walks a creation-order list with an unlocked filter
first, so neither costs more at 65536 buffers than it did at 256.
struct buf's data is a pointer to its own page now; the drivers copy
through their own DMA buffers, so where it sits does not matter.

On a 2 GB QEMU guest: a 40 MB file read back in 0.89 s instead of 1.83,
the big binaries in 0.17 s instead of 0.26. /proc/fsstat shows the
cache as buf_cached now / most.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01S1giNvrHTrPMPw7V6x1kQ4
This commit is contained in:
Nexoniarz 2026-10-23 13:28:12 +02:00
commit 62d2a85ac8
4 changed files with 179 additions and 26 deletions

View file

@ -11,8 +11,16 @@ struct buf {
struct buf *prev; // LRU cache list
struct buf *next;
struct buf *qnext; // disk queue
uchar data[BSIZE];
struct buf *hnext; // hash chain, by (dev, blockno)
struct buf *anext; // every buffer, in the order made; never reordered
// BSIZE bytes, a page of its own. A pointer rather than an array since the
// cache grows at run time (see bio.c); drivers copy through their own DMA
// buffers, so where the page sits does not matter to them.
uchar *data;
};
#define B_VALID 0x2 // buffer has been read from disk
#define B_DIRTY 0x4 // buffer needs to be written to disk
// How many buffers the cache holds now, and the most it will grow to. bio.c.
void bcache_size(uint *n, uint *max);