linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] zram: add zstd to the supported algorithms list

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Message-ID: <08620C31-AD6A-4DDB-ACA6-22243920AE1E@fb.com>
Date:   Fri, 25 Aug 2017 02:09:20 +0000
From:   Nick Terrell <terrelln@...com>
To:     Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky.work@...il.com>
CC:     Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com>,
        "linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        "minchan@...nel.org" <minchan@...nel.org>,
        Yann Collet <cyan@...com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] zram: add zstd to the supported algorithms list

On 8/24/17, 6:53 PM, "Sergey Senozhatsky" <sergey.senozhatsky.work@...il.com> wrote:
> On (08/25/17 01:35), Nick Terrell wrote:
> > On 8/24/17, 5:49 PM, "Joonsoo Kim" <iamjoonsoo.kim@....com> wrote:
> > > On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 09:33:54PM +0000, Nick Terrell wrote:
> > > > On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 10:49:36AM +0900, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> > > > > Add ZSTD to the list of supported compression algorithms.
> > > > > 
> > > > > Official benchmarks [1]:
> > > > 
> > > > Awesome! Let me know if you need anything from me.
> > > > 
> > > Hello, Nick.
> > > 
> > > Awesome work!!!
> > > 
> > > Let me ask a question.
> > > Zram compress and decompress a small data (a page) and your github
> > > site says that using predefined dictionary would be helpful in this
> > > situation. However, it seems that compression crypto API for zstd
> > > doesn't use ZSTD_compress_usingDict(). Is there any plan to support
> > > it?
> 
> excellent question, Joonsoo.
> 
> > I think using dictionaries in zram could be very interesting. We could for
> > example, take a random sample of the RAM and use that as the dictionary
> > for compression. E.g. take 32 512B samples from RAM and build a 16 KB
> > dictionary (sizes may vary).
> > 
> > I'm not sure how you would pass a dictionary into the crypto compression
> > API, but I'm sure we can make something work if dictionary compression
> > proves to be beneficial enough.
> 
> a dictionaty pointer can be in `struct zstd_ctx'.

Sorry I'm not super familiar with the crypto API. How would the user
initialize the dictionary in the `struct zstd_ctx'? I guess you could
either expose the struct in some header, or provide a function that
initializes it, but that isn't generic. Does the crypto library already
have a standard way to provide extra information?

> > What data have you, or anyone, used for benchmarking compression ratio and 
> > speed for RAM? Since it is such a specialized application, the standard
> > compression benchmarks aren't very applicable.
> 
> 
> yeah, I thought that zstd uses dicts unconditionally.
> 
> I used my own simple minded test script:
> 	https://github.com/sergey-senozhatsky/zram-perf-test
> 
> it basically invokes fio with a 'static compression buffer', because
> we want to have the exactly same data to be compressed when I compare
> algorithms... I guess I need to improve it, somehow.

I'll check it out, thanks!

> 
> 	-ss
>