As shown in the patchseries that introduced the zswap same-filled optimization [1], 10-20% of the pages stored in zswap are same-filled. This is also observed across Meta's server fleet. By using VM counters in swap_writepage (not included in this patchseries) it was found that less than 1% of the same-filled pages to be swapped out are non-zero pages. For conventional swap setup (without zswap), rather than reading/writing these pages to flash resulting in increased I/O and flash wear, a bitmap can be used to mark these pages as zero at write time, and the pages can be filled at read time if the bit corresponding to the page is set. When using zswap with swap, this also means that a zswap_entry does not need to be allocated for zero filled pages resulting in memory savings which would offset the memory used for the bitmap. A similar attempt was made earlier in [2] where zswap would only track zero-filled pages instead of same-filled. This patchseries adds zero-filled pages optimization to swap (hence it can be used even if zswap is disabled) and removes the same-filled code from zswap (as only 1% of the same-filled pages are non-zero), simplifying code. This patchseries is based on mm-unstable. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20171018104832epcms5p1b2232e2236258de3d03d1344dde9fce0@epcms5p1/ [2] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20240325235018.2028408-1-yosryahmed@xxxxxxxxxx/ Usama Arif (2): mm: store zero pages to be swapped out in a bitmap mm: remove code to handle same filled pages include/linux/swap.h | 1 + mm/page_io.c | 86 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++-- mm/swapfile.c | 10 ++++++ mm/zswap.c | 79 ++++------------------------------------ 4 files changed, 102 insertions(+), 74 deletions(-) -- 2.43.0
