Re: [PATCHv9 8/8] zswap: add documentation

Rob Landley
2013-04-11T01:43:38Z

On 04/10/2013 01:19:00 PM, Seth Jennings wrote:
> This patch adds the documentation file for the zswap functionality
>
> Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
> ---
> Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt | 2 +-
> Documentation/vm/zswap.txt | 82
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 2 files changed, 83 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-)
> create mode 100644 Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

Acked-by: Rob Landley <rob@landley.net>

Minor kibbitzing anyway:

> diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
> b/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
> index 85aa617..4133ade 100644
> --- a/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
> +++ b/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
> @@ -65,4 +65,4 @@ zs_unmap_object(pool, handle);
> zs_free(pool, handle);
>
> /* destroy the pool */
> -zs_destroy_pool(pool);
> +zs_destroy_pool(pool);
> diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..f29b82f
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
> +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.  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.  This trade-off can result in a significant
> +performance improvement as reads to/writes from to the compressed

writes from to?

> +cache almost always faster that reading from a swap device

are almost

> +which incurs the latency of an asynchronous block I/O read.
> +
> +Some potential benefits:
> +* Desktop/laptop users with limited RAM capacities can mitigate the
> +    performance impact of swapping.
> +* Overcommitted guests that share a common I/O resource can
> +    dramatically reduce their swap I/O pressure, avoiding heavy
> +    handed I/O throttling by the hypervisor.  This allows more work
> +    to get done with less impact to the guest workload and guests
> +    sharing the I/O subsystem
> +* Users with SSDs as swap devices can extend the life of the device
> by
> +    drastically reducing life-shortening writes.

Does it work even if you have no actual swap mounted? And if you swap
to NBD in a cluster it can keep network traffic down.

> +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.  This
> +requirement had been identified in prior community discussions.

I do not understand the "this requirement" sentence: aren't you just
describing the design here? Memory evicts to the compressed cache,
which evicts to persistent storage? What do historical community
discussions have to do with it? "We designed this feature based on user
feedback" is pretty much like saying "and this was developed in an open
source manner"...

> +To enabled zswap, the "enabled" attribute must be set to 1 at boot
> time.
> +e.g. zswap.enabled=1

So if you configure it in, nothing happens. You have to press an extra
button on the command line to have anything actually happen.

Why? (And why can't swapon do this? I dunno, swapon /dev/null or
something, which the swapon guys can make a nice flag for later.)

> +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

s/. This is because zsmalloc/, which/

> +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

returned

> +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.
> +
> +During a page fault on a PTE that is a swap entry, frontswap calls
> +the zswap load function to decompress the page into the page
> +allocated by the page fault handler.
> +
> +Once there are no PTEs referencing a swap page stored in zswap
> +(i.e. the count in the swap_map goes to 0) the swap code calls
> +the zswap invalidate function, via frontswap, to free the compressed
> +entry.
> +
> +Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies.

Does that last sentence actually provide any information, or can it go?

> 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.

Personally I'd put the user-visible control knobs earlier in the file,
before implementation details.

> +Zswap allows the compressor to be selected at kernel boot time by
> +setting the “compressor” attribute. The default compressor is lzo.
> +e.g. zswap.compressor=deflate

Can we hardwire in one at compile time and not have to do this?

> +A debugfs interface is provided for various statistic about pool
> size,

statistics

> +number of pages stored, and various counters for the reasons pages
> +are rejected.
> --
> 1.8.2.1
>
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