Today it's only possible to write back as a page, idle, or huge. A user
might want to writeback pages which are huge and idle first as these idle
pages do not require decompression and make a good first pass for
writeback.
Idle writeback specifically has the advantage that a refault is unlikely
given that the page has been swapped for some amount of time without being
refaulted.
Huge writeback has the advantage that you're guaranteed to get the maximum
benefit from a single page writeback, that is, you're reclaiming one full
page of memory. Pages which are compressed in zram being written back
result in some benefit which is always less than a page size because of
the fact that it was compressed.
The primary use of this is for minimizing refaults in situations where the
device has to be sensitive to storage endurance. On ChromeOS we have
devices with slow eMMC and repeated writes and refaults can negatively
affect performance and endurance.
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20220322215821.1196994-1-bgeffon@google.com
Signed-off-by: Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com>
Acked-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Merge misc updates from Andrew Morton:
- a few random little subsystems
- almost all of the MM patches which are staged ahead of linux-next
material. I'll trickle to post-linux-next work in as the dependents
get merged up.
Subsystems affected by this patch series: kthread, kbuild, ide, ntfs,
ocfs2, arch, and mm (slab-generic, slab, slub, dax, debug, pagecache,
gup, swap, shmem, memcg, pagemap, mremap, hmm, vmalloc, documentation,
kasan, pagealloc, memory-failure, hugetlb, vmscan, z3fold, compaction,
oom-kill, migration, cma, page-poison, userfaultfd, zswap, zsmalloc,
uaccess, zram, and cleanups).
* emailed patches from Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>: (200 commits)
mm: cleanup kstrto*() usage
mm: fix fall-through warnings for Clang
mm: slub: convert sysfs sprintf family to sysfs_emit/sysfs_emit_at
mm: shmem: convert shmem_enabled_show to use sysfs_emit_at
mm:backing-dev: use sysfs_emit in macro defining functions
mm: huge_memory: convert remaining use of sprintf to sysfs_emit and neatening
mm: use sysfs_emit for struct kobject * uses
mm: fix kernel-doc markups
zram: break the strict dependency from lzo
zram: add stat to gather incompressible pages since zram set up
zram: support page writeback
mm/process_vm_access: remove redundant initialization of iov_r
mm/zsmalloc.c: rework the list_add code in insert_zspage()
mm/zswap: move to use crypto_acomp API for hardware acceleration
mm/zswap: fix passing zero to 'PTR_ERR' warning
mm/zswap: make struct kernel_param_ops definitions const
userfaultfd/selftests: hint the test runner on required privilege
userfaultfd/selftests: fix retval check for userfaultfd_open()
userfaultfd/selftests: always dump something in modes
userfaultfd: selftests: make __{s,u}64 format specifiers portable
...
