Cleancache can be thought of as a page-granularity victim cache
for clean pages that the kernel's pageframe replacement algorithm
(PFRA) would like to keep around, but can't since there isn't enough
memory. So when the PFRA "evicts" a page, it first attempts to use
cleancache code to put the data contained in that page into
"transcendent memory", memory that is not directly accessible or
addressable by the kernel and is of unknown and possibly
time-varying size. And when a cleancache-enabled
filesystem wishes to access a page in a file on disk, it first
checks cleancache to see if it already contains it; if it does,
the page is copied into the kernel and a disk access is avoided.
When a transcendent memory driver is available (such as zcache or
Xen transcendent memory), a significant I/O reduction
may be achieved. When none is available, all cleancache calls
are reduced to a single pointer-compare-against-NULL resulting
in a negligible performance hit.

If unsure, say Y to enable cleancache

source code:

mm/cleancache.c