Re: Compressed files & the page cache

Boris Burkov
2025-07-15T21:21:13Z

On Tue, Jul 15, 2025 at 09:40:42PM +0100, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> I've started looking at how the page cache can help filesystems handle
> compressed data better. Feedback would be appreciated! I'll probably
> say a few things which are obvious to anyone who knows how compressed
> files work, but I'm trying to be explicit about my assumptions.
>
> First, I believe that all filesystems work by compressing fixed-size
> plaintext into variable-sized compressed blocks. This would be a good
> point to stop reading and tell me about counterexamples.

As far as I know, btrfs with zstd does not used fixed size plaintext. I
am going off the btrfs logic itself, not the zstd internals which I am
sadly ignorant of. We are using the streaming interface for whatever
that is worth.

Through the following callpath, the len is piped from the async_chunk\
through to zstd via the slightly weirdly named total_out parameter:

compress_file_range()
btrfs_compress_folios()
compression_compress_pages()
zstd_compress_folios()
zstd_get_btrfs_parameters() // passes len
zstd_init_cstream() // passes len
for-each-folio:
zstd_compress_stream() // last folio is truncated if short

# bpftrace to check the size in the zstd callsite
$ sudo bpftrace -e 'fentry:zstd_init_cstream {printf("%llu\n", args.pledged_src_size);}'
Attaching 1 probe...
76800

# diff terminal, write a compressed extent with a weird source size
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/lol/foo bs=75k count=1

We do operate in terms of folios for calling zstd_compress_stream, so
that can be thought of as a fixed size plaintext block, but even so, we
pass in a short block for the last one:
$ sudo bpftrace -e 'fentry:zstd_compress_stream {printf("%llu\n", args.input->size);}'
Attaching 1 probe...
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
4096
3072

>
> From what I've been reading in all your filesystems is that you want to
> allocate extra pages in the page cache in order to store the excess data
> retrieved along with the page that you're actually trying to read. That's
> because compressing in larger chunks leads to better compression.
>
> There's some discrepancy between filesystems whether you need scratch
> space for decompression. Some filesystems read the compressed data into
> the pagecache and decompress in-place, while other filesystems read the
> compressed data into scratch pages and decompress into the page cache.
>
> There also seems to be some discrepancy between filesystems whether the
> decompression involves vmap() of all the memory allocated or whether the
> decompression routines can handle doing kmap_local() on individual pages.
>
> So, my proposal is that filesystems tell the page cache that their minimum
> folio size is the compression block size. That seems to be around 64k,

btrfs has a max uncompressed extent size of 128K, for what it's worth.
In practice, many compressed files are comprised of a large number of
compressed extents each representing a 128k plaintext extent.

Not sure if that is exactly the constant you are concerned with here, or
if it refutes your idea in any way, just figured I would mention it as
well.

> so not an unreasonable minimum allocation size. That removes all the
> extra code in filesystems to allocate extra memory in the page cache.
> It means we don't attempt to track dirtiness at a sub-folio granularity
> (there's no point, we have to write back the entire compressed bock
> at once). We also get a single virtually contiguous block ... if you're
> willing to ditch HIGHMEM support. Or there's a proposal to introduce a
> vmap_file() which would give us a virtually contiguous chunk of memory
> (and could be trivially turned into a noop for the case of trying to
> vmap a single large folio).