Re: what's cooking in zram for 4.1

Sergey Senozhatsky
2015-05-18T14:40:54Z

On (05/18/15 22:55), Minchan Kim wrote:
> > > Why do you need all in one file? ... to provide consistent statistics?
> > >
> >
> > yes, that's the main reason.
>
> In my side, other main reason was to reduce the number of system call
> to see statistics. It is not only syscall overhead itself but also
> causes slightly high-order allocation for kernel internal data structure
> via slab allocation which is bad on low memory situation where is
> frequent in zram-swap. Slab allocation could be fallback with 0-order
> pages but it could cause excessive page reclaim seriously since compaction
> didn't work.
> Yes, it's a one of problem of current VM but there is no reason to hesitate
> if we can avoid such problems and support consistent statistic as well.
>

true.

syscalls and corresponding error handling for each one of them were on a
list:
https://www.marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=142586445420298&w=2

Karel has a remarkably good codebase, so error handling would not be an
issue :-) that's why consistent stats moved forward.

in general, increasing consistency and reducing the syscall pressure are
good enough to move on.

-ss