From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from psmtp.com (na3sys010amx152.postini.com [74.125.245.152]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4E4EF6B000D for ; Mon, 28 Jan 2013 16:55:51 -0500 (EST) Received: from /spool/local by e32.co.us.ibm.com with IBM ESMTP SMTP Gateway: Authorized Use Only! Violators will be prosecuted for from ; Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:55:50 -0700 Received: from d03relay04.boulder.ibm.com (d03relay04.boulder.ibm.com [9.17.195.106]) by d03dlp03.boulder.ibm.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E20719D8043 for ; Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:55:47 -0700 (MST) Received: from d03av02.boulder.ibm.com (d03av02.boulder.ibm.com [9.17.195.168]) by d03relay04.boulder.ibm.com (8.13.8/8.13.8/NCO v10.0) with ESMTP id r0SLtlb8357432 for ; Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:55:47 -0700 Received: from d03av02.boulder.ibm.com (loopback [127.0.0.1]) by d03av02.boulder.ibm.com (8.14.4/8.13.1/NCO v10.0 AVout) with ESMTP id r0SLtiK7006044 for ; Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:55:44 -0700 From: Seth Jennings Subject: =?UTF-8?q?=5BPATCHv3=206/6=5D=20zswap=3A=20add=20documentation?= Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:49:27 -0600 Message-Id: <1359409767-30092-7-git-send-email-sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> In-Reply-To: <1359409767-30092-1-git-send-email-sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> References: <1359409767-30092-1-git-send-email-sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Andrew Morton Cc: Seth Jennings , Greg Kroah-Hartman , Nitin Gupta , Minchan Kim , Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk , Dan Magenheimer , Robert Jennings , Jenifer Hopper , Mel Gorman , Johannes Weiner , Rik van Riel , Larry Woodman , Benjamin Herrenschmidt , Dave Hansen , linux-mm@kvack.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, devel@driverdev.osuosl.org This patch adds the documentation file for the zswap functionality Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings --- Documentation/vm/zswap.txt | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 73 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/vm/zswap.txt diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d00ce9 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +Overview: + +Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes +pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to +compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. +If this process is successful, the writeback to the swap device is +deferred and, in many cases, avoided completely.A This results in +a significant I/O reduction and performance gains for systems that +are swapping. + +Zswap provides compressed swap caching that basically trades CPU cycles +for reduced swap I/O.A This trade-off can result in a significant +performance improvement as reads to/writes from to the compressed +cache almost always faster that reading from a swap device +which incurs the latency of an asynchronous block I/O read. + +Some potential benefits: +* Desktop/laptop users with limited RAM capacities can mitigate the +A A A performance impact of swapping. +* Overcommitted guests that share a common I/O resource can +A A A dramatically reduce their swap I/O pressure, avoiding heavy +A A A handed I/O throttling by the hypervisor.A This allows more work +A A A to get done with less impact to the guest workload and guests +A A A sharing the I/O subsystem +* Users with SSDs as swap devices can extend the life of the device by +A A A drastically reducing life-shortening writes. + +Zswap evicts pages from compressed cache on an LRU basis to the backing +swap device when the compress pool reaches it size limit or the pool is +unable to obtain additional pages from the buddy allocator.A This +requirement had been identified in prior community discussions. + +To enabled zswap, the "enabled" attribute must be set to 1 at boot time. +e.g. zswap.enabled=1 + +Design: + +Zswap receives pages for compression through the Frontswap API and +is able to evict pages from its own compressed pool on an LRU basis +and write them back to the backing swap device in the case that the +compressed pool is full or unable to secure additional pages from +the buddy allocator. + +Zswap makes use of zsmalloc for the managing the compressed memory +pool. This is because zsmalloc is specifically designed to minimize +fragmentation on large (> PAGE_SIZE/2) allocation sizes. Each +allocation in zsmalloc is not directly accessible by address. +Rather, a handle is return by the allocation routine and that handle +must be mapped before being accessed. The compressed memory pool grows +on demand and shrinks as compressed pages are freed. The pool is +not preallocated. + +When a swap page is passed from frontswap to zswap, zswap maintains +a mapping of the swap entry, a combination of the swap type and swap +offset, to the zsmalloc handle that references that compressed swap +page. This mapping is achieved with a red-black tree per swap type. +The swap offset is the search key for the tree nodes. + +Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies. Sysfs attributes allow for +two user controlled policies: +* max_compression_ratio - Maximum compression ratio, as as percentage, + for an acceptable compressed page. Any page that does not compress + by at least this ratio will be rejected. +* max_pool_percent - The maximum percentage of memory that the compressed + pool can occupy. + +Zswap allows the compressor to be selected at kernel boot time by +setting the a??compressora?? attribute. The default compressor is lzo. +e.g. zswap.compressor=deflate + +A debugfs interface is provided for various statistic about pool size, +number of pages stored, and various counters for the reasons pages +are rejected. -- 1.7.9.5 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@kvack.org. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: email@kvack.org