Re: [PATCH v6 01/22] mm/swap: decouple swap cache from physical swap infrastructure

[Yosry Ahmed <yosry@kernel.org>]

On Tue, May 05, 2026 at 08:38:30AM -0700, Nhat Pham wrote:
> When we virtualize the swap space, we will manage swap cache at the
> virtual swap layer. To prepare for this, decouple swap cache from
> physical swap infrastructure.
> 
> We will also remove all the swap cache related helpers of swap table. We
> will keep the rest of the swap table infrastructure, which will be
> repurposed to serve as the rmap (physical -> virtual swap mapping)
> later.

I didn't look through the entire series, but let me ask the same
high-level question I asked before. Instead of moving things out of the
swap table, why not reuse the swap table as the representation of the
virtual swap space? Seems like most/all metadata is already moved there
in a nice concise format.

> 
> Note that with this patch, we will move to a single global lock to
> synchronize swap cache accesses. This is temporarily, as the swap cache
> will be re-partitioned in to (virtual) swap clusters once we move the
> swap cache to the soon-to-be-introduced virtual swap layer.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>