Re: [PATCH v2] PM: hibernate: don't store zero pages in the image file.

[Brian Geffon]

On Sat, Feb 18, 2023 at 6:49 AM Pavel Machek <pavel@xxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Hi!

Hey Pavel,

>
> > > I need some more time to go through this in more detail, so it is
> > > likely to miss 6.3.  Sorry about that.
> >
> > No problem, consider this more of an RFC, it seems like a
> > low-risk/low-cost way to reduce image sizes so I was just hoping to
> > get feedback. Take your time reviewing.
>
> Seems like special case of compression, really, it might be better to
> leave it to compression algorithm to solve that.

It's true that it seems like an optimization that really does resemble
compression. But there are a few distinctions I'd like to call out;
firstly, this optimization has effectively an infinite compression
ratio as the zero pages never have to be included at all for that
reason this benefits both the compressed and non-compressed use-cases.
Additionally, this is basically free for both the swsusp and uswsusp
paths as it's transparently handled in the
snapshot_read_next/snapshot_write_next paths.

>
> Not sure if lzo is optimal if you want max speed, but things like gzip
> should be "almost free", too.

While certain compression algorithms are cheap they are definitely not
free. This specific optimization ultimately results in a single OR
after testing the zero flag from a word copy we were already
performing, now that's pretty much free :)

Another final thing I'd like to note about this is that when
compressing today, the default is to compress in 32 page chunks
(iirc). By including the zero pages in those 32 pages you're limiting
your ability to better compress the "real" data, if that makes sense.
Why bother copying those zero pages over to the compressor kthreads
anyway? With all that being said, the code itself is certainly not
free in the sense that it does add some complexity to both the read
and write paths, do you guys think that additional complexity is worth
the benefits we might see?

>
> Best regards,
>                                                                 Pavel

Thanks for taking the time to discuss this!


Brian

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