Recently, we started to use zram heavily and some of issues popped. 1) external fragmentation I got a report from Juneho Choi that fork failed although there are plenty of free pages in the system. His investigation revealed zram is one of the culprit to make heavy fragmentation so there was no more contiguous 16K page for pgd to fork in the ARM. 2) non-movable pages Other problem of zram now is that inherently, user want to use zram as swap in small memory system so they use zRAM with CMA to use memory efficiently. However, unfortunately, it doesn't work well because zRAM cannot use CMA's movable pages unless it doesn't support compaction. I got several reports about that OOM happened with zram although there are lots of swap space and free space in CMA area. 3) internal fragmentation zRAM has started support memory limitation feature to limit memory usage and I sent a patchset(https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/9/21/148) for VM to be harmonized with zram-swap to stop anonymous page reclaim if zram consumed memory up to the limit although there are free space on the swap. One problem for that direction is zram has no way to know any hole in memory space zsmalloc allocated by internal fragmentation so zram would regard swap is full although there are free space in zsmalloc. For solving the issue, zram want to trigger compaction of zsmalloc before it decides full or not. This patchset is first step to support above issues. For that, it adds indirect layer between handle and object location and supports manual compaction to solve 3th problem first of all. After this patchset got merged, next step is to make VM aware of zsmalloc compaction so that generic compaction will move zsmalloced-pages automatically in runtime. In my imaginary experiment(ie, high compress ratio data with heavy swap in/out on 8G zram-swap), data is as follows, Before = zram allocated object : 60212066 bytes zram total used: 140103680 bytes ratio: 42.98 percent MemFree: 840192 kB Compaction After = frag ratio after compaction zram allocated object : 60212066 bytes zram total used: 76185600 bytes ratio: 79.03 percent MemFree: 901932 kB Juneho reported below in his real platform with small aging. So, I think the benefit would be bigger in real aging system for a long time. - frag_ratio increased 3% (ie, higher is better) - memfree increased about 6MB - In buddy info, Normal 2^3: 4, 2^2: 1: 2^1 increased, Highmem: 2^1 21 increased frag ratio after swap fragment used : 156677 kbytes total: 166092 kbytes frag_ratio : 94 meminfo before compaction MemFree: 83724 kB Node 0, zone Normal 13642 1364 57 10 61 17 9 5 4 0 0 Node 0, zone HighMem 425 29 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 num_migrated : 23630 compaction done frag ratio after compaction used : 156673 kbytes total: 160564 kbytes frag_ratio : 97 meminfo after compaction MemFree: 89060 kB Node 0, zone Normal 14076 1544 67 14 61 17 9 5 4 0 0 Node 0, zone HighMem 863 50 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 This patchset adds more logics(about 480 lines) in zsmalloc but when I tested heavy swapin/out program, the regression for swapin/out speed is marginal because most of overheads were caused by compress/decompress and other MM reclaim stuff. * from v1 * remove rcu - suggested by Joonsoo * iterating biggest size class - Seth * add experiment data in description - Juneho Minchan Kim (7): zsmalloc: decouple handle and object zsmalloc: factor out obj_[malloc|free] zsmalloc: support compaction zsmalloc: adjust ZS_ALMOST_FULL zram: support compaction zsmalloc: record handle in page->private for huge object zsmalloc: add fullness into stat Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block-zram | 15 + drivers/block/zram/zram_drv.c | 25 + drivers/block/zram/zram_drv.h | 1 + include/linux/zsmalloc.h | 1 + mm/zsmalloc.c | 991 +++++++++++++++++++++-------- 5 files changed, 777 insertions(+), 256 deletions(-) -- 1.9.1 -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx";> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>