Re: [RFC PATCH v3 5/5] mm: support large folios swapin as a whole

From: Shakeel Butt
Date: Mon Jun 10 2024 - 16:43:29 EST


On Thu, Mar 14, 2024 at 08:56:17PM GMT, Chuanhua Han wrote:
[...]
> >
> > So in the common case, swap-in will pull in the same size of folio as was
> > swapped-out. Is that definitely the right policy for all folio sizes? Certainly
> > it makes sense for "small" large folios (e.g. up to 64K IMHO). But I'm not sure
> > it makes sense for 2M THP; As the size increases the chances of actually needing
> > all of the folio reduces so chances are we are wasting IO. There are similar
> > arguments for CoW, where we currently copy 1 page per fault - it probably makes
> > sense to copy the whole folio up to a certain size.
> For 2M THP, IO overhead may not necessarily be large? :)
> 1.If 2M THP are continuously stored in the swap device, the IO
> overhead may not be very large (such as submitting bio with one
> bio_vec at a time).
> 2.If the process really needs this 2M data, one page-fault may perform
> much better than multiple.
> 3.For swap devices like zram,using 2M THP might also improve
> decompression efficiency.
>

Sorry for late response, do we have any performance data backing the
above claims particularly for zswap/swap-on-zram cases?