Re: [RFC/T/D][PATCH 2/2] Linux/Guest cooperative unmapped page cachecontrol
From: Balbir Singh
Date: Mon Jun 14 2010 - 13:16:56 EST
* Dave Hansen <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> [2010-06-14 10:09:31]:
> On Mon, 2010-06-14 at 22:28 +0530, Balbir Singh wrote:
> > If you've got duplicate pages and you know
> > that they are duplicated and can be retrieved at a lower cost, why
> > wouldn't we go after them first?
>
> I agree with this in theory. But, the guest lacks the information about
> what is truly duplicated and what the costs are for itself and/or the
> host to recreate it. "Unmapped page cache" may be the best proxy that
> we have at the moment for "easy to recreate", but I think it's still too
> poor a match to make these patches useful.
>
That is why the policy (in the next set) will come from the host. As
to whether the data is truly duplicated, my experiments show up to 60%
of the page cache is duplicated. The first patch today is again
enabled by the host. Both of them are expected to be useful in the
cache != none case.
The data I have shows more details including the performance and
overhead.
--
Three Cheers,
Balbir
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/