During our experiment with zswap, we sometimes observe swap IOs due to
occasional zswap store failures and writebacks-to-swap. These swapping
IOs prevent many users who cannot tolerate swapping from adopting zswap to
save memory and improve performance where possible.
This patch adds the option to disable this behavior entirely: do not
writeback to backing swapping device when a zswap store attempt fail, and
do not write pages in the zswap pool back to the backing swap device (both
when the pool is full, and when the new zswap shrinker is called).
This new behavior can be opted-in/out on a per-cgroup basis via a new
cgroup file. By default, writebacks to swap device is enabled, which is
the previous behavior. Initially, writeback is enabled for the root
cgroup, and a newly created cgroup will inherit the current setting of its
parent.
Note that this is subtly different from setting memory.swap.max to 0, as
it still allows for pages to be stored in the zswap pool (which itself
consumes swap space in its current form).
This patch should be applied on top of the zswap shrinker series:
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20231130194023.4102148-1-nphamcs@gmail.com/
as it also disables the zswap shrinker, a major source of zswap
writebacks.
For the most part, this feature is motivated by internal parties who
have already established their opinions regarding swapping - the
workloads that are highly sensitive to IO, and especially those who are
using servers with really slow disk performance (for instance, massive
but slow HDDs). For these folks, it's impossible to convince them to
even entertain zswap if swapping also comes as a packaged deal.
Writeback disabling is quite a useful feature in these situations - on
a mixed workloads deployment, they can disable writeback for the more
IO-sensitive workloads, and enable writeback for other background
workloads.
For instance, on a server with HDD, I allocate memories and populate
them with random values (so that zswap store will always fail), and
specify memory.high low enough to trigger reclaim. The time it takes
to allocate the memories and just read through it a couple of times
(doing silly things like computing the values' average etc.):
zswap.writeback disabled:
real 0m30.537s
user 0m23.687s
sys 0m6.637s
0 pages swapped in
0 pages swapped out
zswap.writeback enabled:
real 0m45.061s
user 0m24.310s
sys 0m8.892s
712686 pages swapped in
461093 pages swapped out
(the last two lines are from vmstat -s).
[nphamcs@gmail.com: add a comment about recurring zswap store failures leading to reclaim inefficiency]
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20231221005725.3446672-1-nphamcs@gmail.com
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20231207192406.3809579-1-nphamcs@gmail.com
Signed-off-by: Nhat Pham <nphamcs@gmail.com>
Suggested-by: Johannes Weiner <hannes@cmpxchg.org>
Reviewed-by: Yosry Ahmed <yosryahmed@google.com>
Acked-by: Chris Li <chrisl@kernel.org>
Cc: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org>
Cc: David Heidelberg <david@ixit.cz>
Cc: Domenico Cerasuolo <cerasuolodomenico@gmail.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
Cc: Michal Hocko <mhocko@kernel.org>
Cc: Mike Rapoport (IBM) <rppt@kernel.org>
Cc: Muchun Song <muchun.song@linux.dev>
Cc: Roman Gushchin <roman.gushchin@linux.dev>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@chromium.org>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@redhat.com>
Cc: Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>
Cc: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Vitaly Wool <vitaly.wool@konsulko.com>
Cc: Zefan Li <lizefan.x@bytedance.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
501a06fe8e