Hey folks, I was looking at cleaning up the same-filled handling code in zswap, when it hit me that after the xarray conversion, the only member of struct zwap_entry that is relevant to same-filled pages is now the objcg pointer. The xarray allows a pointer to be tagged by up to two tags (1 and 3), so we can completely avoid allocating a zswap_entry for same-filled pages by storing a tagged objcg pointer directly in the xarray instead. Basically the xarray would then either have a pointer to struct zswap_entry or struct obj_cgroup, where the latter is tagged as SAME_FILLED_ONE or SAME_FILLED_ZERO. There are two benefits of this: - Saving some memory (precisely 64 bytes per same-filled entry). - Further separating handling of same-filled pages from compressed pages, which results in some nice cleanups (especially in zswap_store()). It also makes further improvements easier (e.g. skipping limit checking for same-filled entries). The disadvantage is obviously the complexity needed to handle two different types of pointers in the xarray, although I think with the correct abstractions this is not a big deal. I have some untested patches that implement this that I plan on testing and sending out at some point, the reason I am sending this RFC now is to gauge interest. I am not sure how common same-filled pages are. Unfortunately, this data is not easy to collect from our fleet (still working on it), so if someone has data from actual workloads that would be helpful. Running the kernel build test only shows a small amount of same-filled pages landing in zswap, but I am thinking maybe actual workloads have more zerod pages lying around.
