linux-kernel - RE: [PATCH V2 3/7] Cleancache (was Transcendent Memory): VFS hooks

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Date:	Fri, 4 Jun 2010 08:13:14 -0700 (PDT)
From:	Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@...cle.com>
To:	Minchan Kim <minchan.kim@...il.com>
Cc:	chris.mason@...cle.com, viro@...iv.linux.org.uk,
	akpm@...ux-foundation.org, adilger@....COM, tytso@....edu,
	mfasheh@...e.com, joel.becker@...cle.com, matthew@....cx,
	linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	linux-fsdevel@...r.kernel.org, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org,
	ocfs2-devel@....oracle.com, linux-mm@...ck.org, ngupta@...are.org,
	jeremy@...p.org, JBeulich@...ell.com, kurt.hackel@...cle.com,
	npiggin@...e.de, dave.mccracken@...cle.com, riel@...hat.com,
	avi@...hat.com, konrad.wilk@...cle.com
Subject: RE: [PATCH V2 3/7] Cleancache (was Transcendent Memory): VFS hooks

> Hi, Dan.
> I reviewed quickly. So I may be wrong. :)

Hi Minchan --

Thanks for your thorough review!  I don't think anyone
else yet has examined the semantics of the cleancache
patch as deeply as you have.  Excellent!

> > +	/*
> > +	 * if we're uptodate, flush out into the cleancache, otherwise
> > +	 * invalidate any existing cleancache entries.  We can't leave
> > +	 * stale data around in the cleancache once our page is gone
> > +	 */
> > +	if (PageUptodate(page))
> > +		cleancache_put_page(page);
> > +	else
> > +		cleancache_flush_page(mapping, page);
> 
> I doubt it's right place related to PFRA.

I agree it doesn't seem to be the right place, but it does work
and there doesn't seem to be a better place.

> 1)
> You mentiond PFRA in you description and I understood cleancache has
> a cold clean page which is evicted by reclaimer.
> But __remove_from_page_cache can be called by other call sites.
> 
> For example, shmem_write page calls it for moving the page from page
> cache
> to swap cache. Although there isn't the page in page cache, it is in
> swap cache.
> So next read/write of shmem until swapout happens can be read/write in
> swap cache.
> 
> I didn't looked into whole of callsites. But please review again them.

I think the "if (PageUptodate(page))" eliminates all the cases
where bad things can happen.

Note that there may be cases where some unnecessary puts/flushes
occur.  The focus of the patch is on correctness first; it may
be possible to increase performance (marginally) in the future by
reducing unnecessary cases.

> 3) Please consider system memory pressure.
> And I hope Nitin consider this, too.

This is definitely very important but remember that cleancache
provides a great deal of flexibility:  Any page in cleancache
can be thrown away at any time as every page is clean!  It
can even accept a page and throw it away immediately.  Clearly
the backend needs to do this intelligently so this will
take some policy work.

Since I saw you sent a separate response to Nitin, I'll
let him answer for his in-kernel page cache compression
work.  The solution to the similar problem for Xen is
described in the tmem internals document that I think
I pointed to earlier here:
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/documentation/internals/ 

Thanks,
Dan

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