The dm-bufio interface allows you to do cached I/O on devices,

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>