Re: [RFC PATCH 0/4] (Take 2): transcendent memory ("tmem") for Linux

From: Anthony Liguori
Date: Mon Jul 13 2009 - 16:38:55 EST


Chris Mason wrote:
This depends on the extent to which tmem is integrated into the VM. For
filesystem usage, the hooks are relatively simple because we already
have a lot of code sharing in this area. Basically tmem is concerned
with when we free a clean page and when the contents of a particular
offset in the file are no longer valid.

But filesystem usage is perhaps the least interesting part of tmem.

The VMM already knows which pages in the guest are the result of disk IO (it's the one that put it there, afterall). It also knows when those pages have been invalidated (or it can tell based on write-faulting).

The VMM also knows when the disk IO has been rerequested by tracking previous requests. It can keep the old IO requests cached in memory and use that to satisfy re-reads as long as the memory isn't needed for something else. Basically, we have tmem today with kvm and we use it by default by using the host page cache to do I/O caching (via cache=writethrough).

The difference between our "tmem" is that instead of providing an interface where the guest explicitly says, "I'm throwing away this memory, I may need it later", and then asking again for it, the guest throws away the page and then we can later satisfy the disk I/O request that results from re-requesting the page instantaneously.

This transparent approach is far superior too because it enables transparent sharing across multiple guests. This works well for CoW images and would work really well if we had a file system capable of block-level deduplification... :-)

Regards,

Anthony Liguori
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