frontswap: support exclusive gets if tmem backend is capable
Tmem, as originally specified, assumes that "get" operations performed on persistent pools never flush the page of data out of tmem on a successful get, waiting instead for a flush operation. This is intended to mimic the model of a swap disk, where a disk read is non-destructive. Unlike a disk, however, freeing up the RAM can be valuable. Over the years that frontswap was in the review process, several reviewers (and notably Hugh Dickins in 2010) pointed out that this would result, at least temporarily, in two copies of the data in RAM: one (compressed for zcache) copy in tmem, and one copy in the swap cache. We wondered if this could be done differently, at least optionally. This patch allows tmem backends to instruct the frontswap code that this backend performs exclusive gets. Zcache2 already contains hooks to support this feature. Other backends are completely unaffected unless/until they are updated to support this feature. While it is not clear that exclusive gets are a performance win on all workloads at all times, this small patch allows for experimentation by backends. P.S. Let's not quibble about the naming of "get" vs "read" vs "load" etc. The naming is currently horribly inconsistent between cleancache and frontswap and existing tmem backends, so will need to be straightened out as a separate patch. "Get" is used by the tmem architecture spec, existing backends, and all documentation and presentation material so I am using it in this patch. Signed-off-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> Signed-off-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Loading
Please register or sign in to comment