From c6f31ba479db0137eb8f64a86cb85f75a7164ebb Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Seth Jennings Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:52:30 +1000 Subject: [PATCH] zswap: add documentation Add the documentation file for the zswap functionality Signed-off-by: Seth Jennings Acked-by: Rik van Riel Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman Cc: Nitin Gupta Cc: Minchan Kim Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk Cc: Dan Magenheimer Cc: Robert Jennings Cc: Jenifer Hopper Cc: Mel Gorman Cc: Johannes Weiner Cc: Larry Woodman Cc: Benjamin Herrenschmidt Cc: Dave Hansen Cc: Joe Perches Cc: Joonsoo Kim Cc: Cody P Schafer Cc: Hugh Dickens Cc: Paul Mackerras Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton --- Documentation/vm/zswap.txt | 68 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 68 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 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. -- 2.39.5