linux-kernel - Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/4] Introduce merge identical pages mechanism

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Date:   Tue, 22 Nov 2022 12:00:36 +0900
From:   Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@...omium.org>
To:     Johannes Weiner <hannes@...xchg.org>
Cc:     Alexey Romanov <avromanov@...rdevices.ru>, minchan@...nel.org,
        senozhatsky@...omium.org, ngupta@...are.org,
        akpm@...ux-foundation.org, linux-mm@...ck.org,
        linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, kernel@...rdevices.ru,
        ddrokosov@...rdevices.ru
Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH v1 0/4] Introduce merge identical pages mechanism

On (22/11/21 15:44), Johannes Weiner wrote:
> This looks pretty great.
> 
> However, I'm curious why it's specific to zram, and not part of
> zsmalloc? That way zswap would benefit as well, without having to
> duplicate the implementation. This happened for example with
> page_same_filled() and zswap_is_page_same_filled().
> 
> It's zsmalloc's job to store content efficiently, so couldn't this
> feature (just like the page_same_filled one) be an optimization that
> zsmalloc does transparently for all its users?

Yea, that's a much needed functionality, but things may be "complicated".
We had that KSM-ish thing in the past in zram. Very briefly as we quickly
found out that the idea was patented by some company in China and we couldn't
figure our if it was safe to land that code upstream. So we ended up dropping
the patches.

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/1494556204-25796-1-git-send-email-iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com/

> Would it make sense to hook this up to a shrinker?

Hmm, ratelimited perhaps. We most likely don't want to scan the whole pool
every time a shrinker calls us (which can be quite often).