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>
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