RE: zsmalloc limitations and related topics

[Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>]

> From: Robert Jennings [mailto:rcj@linux.vnet.ibm.com]
> Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2013 7:21 AM
> To: Bob
> Cc: Seth Jennings; Dan Magenheimer; minchan@kernel.org; Nitin Gupta; Konrad Wilk; linux-mm@kvack.org;
> linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org; Bob Liu; Luigi Semenzato; Mel Gorman
> Subject: Re: zsmalloc limitations and related topics
> 
> * Bob (bob.liu@oracle.com) wrote:
> > On 03/14/2013 06:59 AM, Seth Jennings wrote:
> > >On 03/13/2013 03:02 PM, Dan Magenheimer wrote:
> > >>>From: Robert Jennings [mailto:rcj@linux.vnet.ibm.com]
> > >>>Subject: Re: zsmalloc limitations and related topics
> > >>
> <snip>
> > >>Yes.  And add pageframe-reclaim to this list of things that
> > >>zsmalloc should do but currently cannot do.
> > >
> > >The real question is why is pageframe-reclaim a requirement?  What
> > >operation needs this feature?
> > >
> > >AFAICT, the pageframe-reclaim requirements is derived from the
> > >assumption that some external control path should be able to tell
> > >zswap/zcache to evacuate a page, like the shrinker interface.  But this
> > >introduces a new and complex problem in designing a policy that doesn't
> > >shrink the zpage pool so aggressively that it is useless.
> > >
> > >Unless there is another reason for this functionality I'm missing.
> > >
> >
> > Perhaps it's needed if the user want to enable/disable the memory
> > compression feature dynamically.
> > Eg, use it as a module instead of recompile the kernel or even
> > reboot the system.

It's worth thinking about: Under what circumstances would a user want
to turn off compression?  While unloading a compression module should
certainly be allowed if it makes a user comfortable, in my opinion,
if a user wants to do that, we have done our job poorly (or there
is a bug).

> To unload zswap all that is needed is to perform writeback on the pages
> held in the cache, this can be done by extending the existing writeback
> code.

Actually, frontswap supports this directly.  See frontswap_shrink.

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