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Date: Mon, 28 Jan 2013 15:49:27 -0600 From: Seth Jennings <sjenning@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> To: Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org> Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>, Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@...uxfoundation.org>, Nitin Gupta <ngupta@...are.org>, Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>, Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@...cle.com>, Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@...cle.com>, Robert Jennings <rcj@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>, Jenifer Hopper <jhopper@...ibm.com>, Mel Gorman <mgorman@...e.de>, Johannes Weiner <jweiner@...hat.com>, Rik van Riel <riel@...hat.com>, Larry Woodman <lwoodman@...hat.com>, Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@...nel.crashing.org>, Dave Hansen <dave@...ux.vnet.ibm.com>, linux-mm@...ck.org, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, devel@...verdev.osuosl.org Subject: [PATCHv3 6/6] zswap: add documentation This patch adds the documentation file for the zswap functionality Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings <sjenning@...ux.vnet.ibm.com> --- Documentation/vm/zswap.txt | 73 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 73 insertions(+) create mode 100644 Documentation/vm/zswap.txt diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5d00ce9 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt @@ -0,0 +1,73 @@ +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 +cache almost always faster that reading from a swap device +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. + +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. + +To enabled zswap, the "enabled" attribute must be set to 1 at boot time. +e.g. zswap.enabled=1 + +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 +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 +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. + +Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies. 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. + +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 + +A debugfs interface is provided for various statistic about pool size, +number of pages stored, and various counters for the reasons pages +are rejected. -- 1.7.9.5 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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