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author | Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> | 2013-07-11 03:05:05 +0400 |
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committer | Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> | 2013-07-11 05:11:34 +0400 |
commit | 61b0d76017a50c263c303fa263b295b04e0c68f6 (patch) | |
tree | 6db1222d90485b3eb3c36651cfd23127e0cf84ad /Documentation | |
parent | 2b2811178e85553405b86e3fe78357b9b95889ce (diff) | |
download | linux-61b0d76017a50c263c303fa263b295b04e0c68f6.tar.xz |
zswap: add documentation
Add the documentation file for the zswap functionality
Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
Cc: Robert Jennings <rcj@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Jenifer Hopper <jhopper@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Johannes Weiner <jweiner@redhat.com>
Cc: Larry Woodman <lwoodman@redhat.com>
Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt <benh@kernel.crashing.org>
Cc: Dave Hansen <dave@sr71.net>
Cc: Joe Perches <joe@perches.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Cc: Cody P Schafer <cody@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickens <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Paul Mackerras <paulus@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/vm/zswap.txt | 68 |
1 files changed, 68 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..7e492d8aaeaf --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt @@ -0,0 +1,68 @@ +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. zswap basically trades CPU cycles +for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a +significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are +faster than reads from a swap device. + +NOTE: Zswap is a new feature as of v3.11 and interacts heavily with memory +reclaim. This interaction has not be fully explored on the large set of +potential configurations and workloads that exist. For this reason, zswap +is a work in progress and should be considered experimental. + +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 compressed pool reaches it size limit. 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. + +Zswap makes use of zbud for the managing the compressed memory pool. Each +allocation in zbud 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 zbud +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. + +During a page fault on a PTE that is a swap entry, frontswap calls the zswap +load function to decompress the page into the page allocated by the page fault +handler. + +Once there are no PTEs referencing a swap page stored in zswap (i.e. the count +in the swap_map goes to 0) the swap code calls the zswap invalidate function, +via frontswap, to free the compressed entry. + +Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies. Sysfs attributes allow for one user +controlled policies: +* 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. |