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Commit 2a8f9449 authored by Shaohua Li's avatar Shaohua Li Committed by Linus Torvalds
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swap: change block allocation algorithm for SSD



I'm using a fast SSD to do swap.  scan_swap_map() sometimes uses up to
20~30% CPU time (when cluster is hard to find, the CPU time can be up to
80%), which becomes a bottleneck.  scan_swap_map() scans a byte array to
search a 256 page cluster, which is very slow.

Here I introduced a simple algorithm to search cluster.  Since we only
care about 256 pages cluster, we can just use a counter to track if a
cluster is free.  Every 256 pages use one int to store the counter.  If
the counter of a cluster is 0, the cluster is free.  All free clusters
will be added to a list, so searching cluster is very efficient.  With
this, scap_swap_map() overhead disappears.

This might help low end SD card swap too.  Because if the cluster is
aligned, SD firmware can do flash erase more efficiently.

We only enable the algorithm for SSD.  Hard disk swap isn't fast enough
and has downside with the algorithm which might introduce regression (see
below).

The patch slightly changes which cluster is choosen.  It always adds free
cluster to list tail.  This can help wear leveling for low end SSD too.
And if no cluster found, the scan_swap_map() will do search from the end
of last cluster.  So if no cluster found, the scan_swap_map() will do
search from the end of last free cluster, which is random.  For SSD, this
isn't a problem at all.

Another downside is the cluster must be aligned to 256 pages, which will
reduce the chance to find a cluster.  I would expect this isn't a big
problem for SSD because of the non-seek penality.  (And this is the reason
I only enable the algorithm for SSD).

Signed-off-by: default avatarShaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Kyungmin Park <kmpark@infradead.org>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarAndrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarLinus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
parent 15ca220e
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