linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH] zram: Add a huge

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Date:   Fri, 18 Mar 2022 10:30:23 -0700
From:   Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org>
To:     Brian Geffon <bgeffon@...gle.com>
Cc:     Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
        Nitin Gupta <ngupta@...are.org>,
        Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@...omium.org>,
        LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>, linux-doc@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-block@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] zram: Add a huge_idle writeback mode

On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 12:51:14PM -0400, Brian Geffon wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 18, 2022 at 12:41 PM Minchan Kim <minchan@...nel.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Tue, Mar 15, 2022 at 10:22:21AM -0700, Brian Geffon wrote:
> > > Today it's only possible to write back as a page, idle, or huge.
> > > A user might want to writeback pages which are huge and idle first
> > > as these idle pages do not require decompression and make a good
> > > first pass for writeback.
> >
> > Hi Brian,
> >
> > I am not sure how much the decompression overhead matter for idle pages
> > writeback since it's already *very slow* path in zram but I agree that
> > it would be a good first pass since the memory saving for huge writing
> > would be cost efficient.
> >
> > Just out of curiosity. Do you have real usecase?
> 
> Hi Minchan,
> Thank you for taking a look. When we are thinking about writeback
> we're trying to be very sensitive to our devices storage endurance,
> for this reason we will have a fairly conservative writeback limit.
> Given that, we want to make sure we're maximizing what lands on disk
> while still minimizing the refault time. We could take the approach
> where we always writeback huge pages but then we may result in very
> quick refaults which would be a huge waste of time. So idle writeback
> is a must for us and being able to writeback the pages which have
> maximum value (huge) would be very useful.

Thanks for sharing the thought. It really make sense to me and
would be great if it goes on the description.