On 26.09.23 06:09, Stefan Roesch wrote:
This change adds a "smart" page scanning mode for KSM. So far all the candidate pages are continuously scanned to find candidates for de-duplication. There are a considerably number of pages that cannot be de-duplicated. This is costly in terms of CPU. By using smart scanning considerable CPU savings can be achieved. This change takes the history of scanning pages into account and skips the page scanning of certain pages for a while if de-deduplication for this page has not been successful in the past. To do this it introduces two new fields in the ksm_rmap_item structure: age and remaining_skips. age, is the KSM age and remaining_skips determines how often scanning of this page is skipped. The age field is incremented each time the page is scanned and the page cannot be de- duplicated. age updated is capped at U8_MAX. How often a page is skipped is dependent how often de-duplication has been tried so far and the number of skips is currently limited to 8. This value has shown to be effective with different workloads. The feature is currently disable by default and can be enabled with the new smart_scan knob. The feature has shown to be very effective: upt to 25% of the page scans can be eliminated; the pages_to_scan rate can be reduced by 40 - 50% and a similar de-duplication rate can be maintained.
Thinking about it, what are the cons of just enabling this always and not exposing new toggles? Alternatively, we could make this a compile-time option.
In general, LGTM, just curious if we really have to make this configurable. -- Cheers, David / dhildenb
