Commit 76426daf authored by Dan Magenheimer's avatar Dan Magenheimer Committed by Greg Kroah-Hartman

staging/zcache: Fix/improve zcache writeback code, tie to a config option

It was observed by Andrea Arcangeli in 2011 that zcache can get "full"
and there must be some way for compressed swap pages to be (uncompressed
and then) sent through to the backing swap disk.  A prototype of this
functionality, called "unuse", was added in 2012 as part of a major update
to zcache (aka "zcache2"), but was left unfinished due to the unfortunate
temporary fork of zcache.

This earlier version of the code had an unresolved memory leak
and was anyway dependent on not-yet-upstream frontswap and mm changes.
The code was meanwhile adapted by Seth Jennings for similar
functionality in zswap (which he calls "flush").  Seth also made some
clever simplifications which are herein ported back to zcache.  As a
result of those simplifications, the frontswap changes are no longer
necessary, but a slightly different (and simpler) set of mm changes are
still required [1].  The memory leak is also fixed.

Due to feedback from akpm in a zswap thread, this functionality in zcache
has now been renamed from "unuse" to "writeback".

Although this zcache writeback code now works, there are open questions
as how best to handle the policy that drives it.  As a result, this
patch also ties writeback to a new config option.  And, since the
code still depends on not-yet-upstreamed mm patches, to avoid build
problems, the config option added by this patch temporarily depends
on "BROKEN"; this config dependency can be removed in trees that
contain the necessary mm patches.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/1/29/540/ https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/1/29/539/Signed-off-by: default avatarDan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
parent 78110bb8
......@@ -24,3 +24,20 @@ config RAMSTER
while minimizing total RAM across the cluster. RAMster, like
zcache2, compresses swap pages into local RAM, but then remotifies
the compressed pages to another node in the RAMster cluster.
# Depends on not-yet-upstreamed mm patches to export end_swap_bio_write and
# __add_to_swap_cache, and implement __swap_writepage (which is swap_writepage
# without the frontswap call. When these are in-tree, the dependency on
# BROKEN can be removed
config ZCACHE_WRITEBACK
bool "Allow compressed swap pages to be writtenback to swap disk"
depends on ZCACHE=y && BROKEN
default n
help
Zcache caches compressed swap pages (and other data) in RAM which
often improves performance by avoiding I/O's due to swapping.
In some workloads with very long-lived large processes, it can
instead reduce performance. Writeback decompresses zcache-compressed
pages (in LRU order) when under memory pressure and writes them to
the backing swap disk to ameliorate this problem. Policy driving
writeback is still under development.
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