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Software SSD Cache Implementation For Linux?

Annirak writes "With the bottom dropping out of the magnetic disk market and SSD prices still over $3/GB, I want to know if there is a way to to get the best of both worlds. Ideally, a caching algorithm would store frequently used sectors, or sectors used during boot or application launches (hot sectors), to the SSD. Adaptec has a firmware implementation of this concept, called MaxIQ, but this is only for use on their RAID controllers and only works with their special, even more expensive, SSD. Silverstone recently released a device which does this for a single disk, but it is limited: it caches the first part of the magnetic disk, up to the size of the SSD, rather than caching frequently used sectors. The FS-Cache implementation in recent Linux kernels seems to be primarily intended for use in NFS and AFS, without much provision for speeding up local filesystems. Is there a way to use an SSD to act as a hot sector cache for a magnetic disk under Linux?"

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  1. Loopback NFS broken??? by Gekke+Eekhoorn · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Can you elaborate on that broken loopback NFS in Linux? I couldn't find anything about that, last mention of it being broken was in 2002.

    You know, a lot of people use loopback nfs for crypto homedirs and I think fuse. I'd like to think that it isn't broken...