On Mon, Apr 16 2018 at 10:37am -0400, Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Mon, 16 Apr 2018, Mike Snitzer wrote: > > > On Mon, Apr 16 2018 at 8:38am -0400, > > Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > On 04/13/2018 05:10 PM, Mike Snitzer wrote: > > > > On Fri, Apr 13 2018 at 5:22am -0400, > > > > Vlastimil Babka <vbabka@xxxxxxx> wrote: > > > >> > > > >> Would this perhaps be a good LSF/MM discussion topic? Mikulas, are you > > > >> attending, or anyone else that can vouch for your usecase? > > > > > > > > Any further discussion on SLAB_MINIMIZE_WASTE should continue on list. > > > > > > > > Mikulas won't be at LSF/MM. But I included Mikulas' dm-bufio changes > > > > that no longer depend on this proposed SLAB_MINIMIZE_WASTE (as part of > > > > the 4.17 merge window). > > > > > > Can you or Mikulas briefly summarize how the dependency is avoided, and > > > whether if (something like) SLAB_MINIMIZE_WASTE were implemented, the > > > dm-bufio code would happily switch to it, or not? > > > > git log eeb67a0ba04df^..45354f1eb67224669a1 -- drivers/md/dm-bufio.c > > > > But the most signficant commit relative to SLAB_MINIMIZE_WASTE is: > > 359dbf19ab524652a2208a2a2cddccec2eede2ad ("dm bufio: use slab cache for > > dm_buffer structure allocations") > > > > So no, I don't see why dm-bufio would need to switch to > > SLAB_MINIMIZE_WASTE if it were introduced in the future. > > Currently, the slab cache rounds up the size of the slab to the next power > of two (if the size is large). And that wastes memory if that memory were > to be used for deduplication tables. You mean on an overall size of the cache level? Or on a per-object level? I can only imagine you mean the former. > Generally, the performance of the deduplication solution depends on how > much data can you put to memory. If you round 640KB buffer to 1MB (this is > what the slab and slub subsystem currently do), you waste a lot of memory. > Deduplication indices with 640KB blocks are already used in the wild, so > it can't be easily changed. OK, seems you're suggesting a single object is rounded up.. so then this header is very wrong?: commit 359dbf19ab524652a2208a2a2cddccec2eede2ad Author: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Mon Mar 26 20:29:45 2018 +0200 dm bufio: use slab cache for dm_buffer structure allocations kmalloc padded to the next power of two, using a slab cache avoids this. Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@xxxxxxxxxx> Please clarify further, thanks! Mike