README

fincore
=======
A utility for determining whether a file is in the kernel's buffer cache.

This simple program iterates over a list of files and calls mmap() and then
mincore() for each disk block of a file.  It reports whether the blocks are in
the kernel's page buffer cache.

This is a fully C implementation of David Plonka's fincore work, available at
http://net.doit.wisc.edu/~plonka/fincore/

Quickstart
==========

Let's look at a large file (i760User.pdf).  87% of this file is in the buffer
cache.  There are a total of 67770 pages.

  $ fincore i760User.pdf 
  File  Size  Pages  Percent
  i760User.pdf 67770 59167 0.87

Let's look at netstat-trace.txt and see WHICH pages (blocks) are in the buffer
cache.  See that the first 8 pages of the 162 block file are in core.

  $ fincore -v netstat-trace.txt
  File  Size  Pages  Percent Details
  netstat-trace.txt 162 8 0.05 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Let's get a report on all .txt files in the current directory to see what
subset of them are in core.

  $ fincore -S *.txt
  Total files: 121
  Total pages: 2344
  Total in core:16

Building
========
The autotools are used for building the package.

  ./configure && make

If you have an RPM-based system, you should also be able to build an RPM of
the package straight from the tarball:

  rpmbuild -ta fincore-0.11.tar.gz


Credits
=======
The idea for this project derives from David Plonka's utility.  Almost all of
the code involved in the main loop of the program is unchanged from the
Inline::C code used by the perl implementation.

  Martin A. Brown <martin@linux-ip.net>
    - primary contact for this utility
  Dave Plonka <plonka@cs.wisc.edu>
    - perl implementation, using Inline::C
  Nathan Burnett <ncb@cs.wisc.edu>
    - unreleased prior work