![Minchan Kim](/assets/img/avatar_default.png)
zRam as swap is useful for small memory device. However, swap means those pages on zram are mostly cold pages due to VM's LRU algorithm. Especially, once init data for application are touched for launching, they tend to be not accessed any more and finally swapped out. zRAM can store such cold pages as compressed form but it's pointless to keep in memory. Better idea is app developers free them directly rather than remaining them on heap. This patch tell us last access time of each block of zram via "cat /sys/kernel/debug/zram/zram0/block_state". The output is as follows, 300 75.033841 .wh 301 63.806904 s.. 302 63.806919 ..h First column is zram's block index and 3rh one represents symbol (s: same page w: written page to backing store h: huge page) of the block state. Second column represents usec time unit of the block was last accessed. So above example means the 300th block is accessed at 75.033851 second and it was huge so it was written to the backing store. Admin can leverage this information to catch cold|incompressible pages of process with *pagemap* once part of heaps are swapped out. I used the feature a few years ago to find memory hoggers in userspace to notify them what memory they have wasted without touch for a long time. With it, they could reduce unnecessary memory space. However, at that time, I hacked up zram for the feature but now I need the feature again so I decided it would be better to upstream rather than keeping it alone. I hope I submit the userspace tool to use the feature soon. [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 printk warning] [minchan@kernel.org: use ktime_get_boottime() instead of sched_clock()] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180420063525.GA253739@rodete-desktop-imager.corp.google.com [akpm@linux-foundation.org: documentation tweak] [akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 printk warning] [minchan@kernel.org: fix compile warning] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180508104849.GA8209@rodete-desktop-imager.corp.google.com [rdunlap@infradead.org: fix printk formats] Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/3652ccb1-96ef-0b0b-05d1-f661d7733dcc@infradead.org Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180416090946.63057-5-minchan@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org> Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com> Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
39 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
39 lines
1.3 KiB
Plaintext
# SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
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config ZRAM
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tristate "Compressed RAM block device support"
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depends on BLOCK && SYSFS && ZSMALLOC && CRYPTO
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select CRYPTO_LZO
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default n
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help
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Creates virtual block devices called /dev/zramX (X = 0, 1, ...).
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Pages written to these disks are compressed and stored in memory
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itself. These disks allow very fast I/O and compression provides
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good amounts of memory savings.
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It has several use cases, for example: /tmp storage, use as swap
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disks and maybe many more.
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See Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt for more information.
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config ZRAM_WRITEBACK
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bool "Write back incompressible page to backing device"
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depends on ZRAM
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default n
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help
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With incompressible page, there is no memory saving to keep it
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in memory. Instead, write it out to backing device.
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For this feature, admin should set up backing device via
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/sys/block/zramX/backing_dev.
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See Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt for more information.
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config ZRAM_MEMORY_TRACKING
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bool "Track zRam block status"
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depends on ZRAM && DEBUG_FS
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help
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With this feature, admin can track the state of allocated blocks
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of zRAM. Admin could see the information via
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/sys/kernel/debug/zram/zramX/block_state.
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See Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt for more information.
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