Re: [PATCH v5 01/11] mm, swap: add virtual swap device infrastructure

[Chris Li]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 3:15 PM Rik van Riel <riel@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, 2026-09-24 at 14:43 -1000, Chris Li wrote:
> > On Thu, Sep 24, 2026 at 6:20 AM Nhat Pham <nphamcs@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> >
> > > It is needed because vswap *is* a special device, with its own
> > > requirements. If you don't special case-it, you'd get undesirable
> > > behaviors.
> >
> > Ack, that is why I am against making it a special device. That is the
> > whole idea behind xswap. It is just normal swap device implemented
> > via
> > swap_ops just like ext4 is a file system implemnet on top of VFS.
>
> The filesystem layer is relatively clean because
> it has a VFS.
>
> Are you saying it is time we have a similar
> abstraction layer on the swap side?

Yes, you understand me well. The swap side VFS already started as
swap_ops. I give a LSF/MM talk on it as well. It is already cleaning
up some ZRAM special cases in the block layer. That is what xswap is
building on top of.

Chris