Date:	Mon, 12 Sep 2011 09:35:50 -0500
From:	Seth Jennings <sjenning@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>
To:	Nitin Gupta <ngupta@...are.org>
CC:	Greg KH <greg@...ah.com>, gregkh@...e.de,
	devel@...verdev.osuosl.org, dan.magenheimer@...cle.com,
	cascardo@...oscopio.com, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, linux-mm@...ck.org,
	brking@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, rcj@...ux.vnet.ibm.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] staging: zcache: xcfmalloc support

On 09/09/2011 09:41 PM, Nitin Gupta wrote:
> On 09/09/2011 04:34 PM, Greg KH wrote:
> 
>> On Wed, Sep 07, 2011 at 09:09:04AM -0500, Seth Jennings wrote:
>>> Changelog:
>>> v2: fix bug in find_remove_block()
>>>     fix whitespace warning at EOF
>>>
>>> This patchset introduces a new memory allocator for persistent
>>> pages for zcache.  The current allocator is xvmalloc.  xvmalloc
>>> has two notable limitations:
>>> * High (up to 50%) external fragmentation on allocation sets > PAGE_SIZE/2
>>> * No compaction support which reduces page reclaimation
>>
>> I need some acks from other zcache developers before I can accept this.
>>
> 
> First, thanks for this new allocator; xvmalloc badly needed a replacement :)
> 

Hey Nitin, I hope your internship went well :)  It's good to hear from you.

> I went through xcfmalloc in detail and would be posting detailed
> comments tomorrow.  In general, it seems to be quite similar to the
> "chunk based" allocator used in initial implementation of "compcache" --
> please see section 2.3.1 in this paper:
> http://www.linuxsymposium.org/archives/OLS/Reprints-2007/briglia-Reprint.pdf
> 

Ah, indeed they look similar.  I didn't know that this approach
had already been done before in the history of this project.

> I'm really looking forward to a slab based allocator as I mentioned in
> the initial mail:
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.mm/65467
> 
> With the current design xcfmalloc suffers from issues similar to the
> allocator described in the paper:
>  - High metadata overhead
>  - Difficult implementation of compaction
>  - Need for extra memcpy()s  etc.
> 
> With slab based approach, we can almost eliminate any metadata overhead,
> remove any free chunk merging logic, simplify compaction and so on.
> 

Just to align my understanding with yours, when I hear slab-based,
I'm thinking each page in the compressed memory pool will contain
1 or more blocks that are all the same size.  Is this what you mean?

If so, I'm not sure how changing to a slab-based system would eliminate
metadata overhead or do away with memcpy()s.

The memcpy()s are a side effect of having an allocation spread over
blocks in different pages.  I'm not seeing a way around this.

It also follows that the blocks that make up an allocation must be in
a list of some kind, leading to some amount of metadata overhead.

If you want to do compaction, it follows that you can't give the user
a direct pointer to the data, since the location of that data may change.
In this case, an indirection layer is required (i.e. xcf_blkdesc and
xcf_read()/xcf_write()).

The only part of the metadata that could be done away with in a slab-
based approach, as far as I can see, is the prevoffset field in xcf_blkhdr,
since the size of the previous block in the page (or the previous object
in the slab) can be inferred from the size of the current block/object.

I do agree that we don't have to worry about free block merging in a
slab-based system.

I didn't implement compaction so a slab-based system could very well
make it easier.  I guess it depends on how one ends up doing it.

Anyway, I look forward to your detailed comments :)

--
Seth

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