Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-18 00:36 UTC
[Xen-devel] Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory Transcendent memory Changes since RFC "Take 2" posting (7 July 2009) reviewed at http://lwn.net/Articles/340080/ 1) Refreshed to 2.6.32 2) Support added for btrfs and ext4 3) "Precache" and "preswap" renamed to "cleancache" and "frontswap" in response to feedback that "pre" is overloaded and too generic. 4) Most important usage statistics now provided via sysfs, under /sys/vm/tmem/cleancache and /sys/vm/tmem/frontswap. 5) Shared pools security issue resolved by external administrative tools; shared pool support and ocfs2 support added back again. 6) Some performance measurement done (on a linux-compile workload) and presented at OLS; in short, showed savings of ~300 IO/sec at an approximate cost of 0.1%-0.2% of one CPU. And FYI, tmem support is now released as a technology preview in Oracle''s Xen-based Oracle VM 2.2 product and will be released with Xen 4.0 early in 2010. Both of these provide full save/restore/live migration support for tmem-enabled VMs and a small set of console-oriented management tools to view detailed tmem usage across all domains that use tmem. (Transcendent memory documentation follows below diffstats.) Signed-off-by: Dan Magenheimer <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> Changed core kernel files: fs/btrfs/extent_io.c | 9 +++ fs/btrfs/super.c | 2 fs/buffer.c | 5 ++ fs/ext3/super.c | 2 fs/ext4/super.c | 2 fs/mpage.c | 8 +++ fs/ocfs2/super.c | 2 fs/super.c | 6 ++ include/linux/fs.h | 7 ++ include/linux/swap.h | 51 +++++++++++++++++++++ include/linux/sysctl.h | 1 kernel/sysctl.c | 11 ++++ mm/Kconfig | 26 ++++++++++ mm/Makefile | 3 + mm/filemap.c | 11 ++++ mm/page_io.c | 12 ++++ mm/swapfile.c | 43 +++++++++++++++-- mm/truncate.c | 10 ++++ 18 files changed, 204 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-) Newly added core kernel files: Documentation/transcendent-memory.txt | 176 +++++++++++ include/linux/tmem.h | 88 +++++ mm/cleancache.c | 184 ++++++++++++ mm/frontswap.c | 319 +++++++++++++++++++++ 4 files changed, 767 insertions(+) Changed xen-specific files: arch/x86/include/asm/xen/hypercall.h | 8 +++ drivers/xen/Makefile | 1 include/xen/interface/tmem.h | 43 +++++++++++++++++++++ include/xen/interface/xen.h | 22 ++++++++++ 4 files changed, 74 insertions(+) Newly added xen-specific files: drivers/xen/tmem.c | 97 +++++++++++++++++++++ include/xen/interface/tmem.h | 43 +++++++++ 2 files changed, 140 insertions(+) Normal memory is directly addressable by the kernel, of a known normally-fixed size, synchronously accessible, and persistent (though not across a reboot). What if there was a class of memory that is of unknown and dynamically variable size, is addressable only indirectly by the kernel, can be configured either as persistent or as "ephemeral" (meaning it will be around for awhile, but might disappear without warning), and is still fast enough to be synchronously accessible? We call this latter class "transcendent memory" and it provides an interesting opportunity to more efficiently utilize RAM in a virtualized environment. However this "memory but not really memory" may also have applications in NON-virtualized environments, such as hotplug-memory deletion, SSDs, and page cache compression. Others have suggested ideas such as allowing use of highmem memory without a highmem kernel, or use of spare video memory. Transcendent memory, or "tmem" for short, provides a well-defined API to access this unusual class of memory. (A summary of the API is provided below.) The basic operations are page-copy-based and use a flexible object-oriented addressing mechanism. Tmem assumes that some "privileged entity" is capable of executing tmem requests and storing pages of data; this entity is currently a hypervisor and operations are performed via hypercalls, but the entity could be a kernel policy, or perhaps a "memory node" in a cluster of blades connected by a high-speed interconnect such as hypertransport or QPI. Since tmem is not directly accessible and because page copying is done to/from physical pageframes, it more suitable for in-kernel memory needs than for userland applications. However, there may be yet undiscovered userland possibilities. With the tmem concept outlined vaguely and its broader potential hinted, we will overview two existing examples of how tmem can be used by the kernel. "Cleancache" can be thought of as a page-granularity victim cache for clean pages that the kernel''s pageframe replacement algorithm (PFRA) would like to keep around, but can''t since there isn''t enough memory. So when the PFRA "evicts" a page, it first puts it into the cleancache via a call to tmem. And any time a filesystem reads a page from disk, it first attempts to get the page from cleancache. If it''s there, a disk access is eliminated. If not, the filesystem just goes to the disk like normal. Cleancache is "ephemeral" so whether a page is kept in cleancache (between the "put" and the "get") is dependent on a number of factors that are invisible to the kernel. "Frontswap" is so named because it can be thought of as the opposite of a "backing store". Frontswap IS persistent, but for various reasons may not always be available for use, again due to factors that may not be visible to the kernel. (But, briefly, if the kernel is being "good" and has shared its resources nicely, then it will be able to use frontswap, else it will not.) Once a page is put, a get on the page will always succeed. So when the kernel finds itself in a situation where it needs to swap out a page, it first attempts to use frontswap. If the put works, a disk write and (usually) a disk read are avoided. If it doesn''t, the page is written to swap as usual. Unlike cleancache, whether a page is stored in frontswap vs swap is recorded in kernel data structures, so when a page needs to be fetched, the kernel does a get if it is in frontswap and reads from swap if it is not in frontswap. Both cleancache and frontswap may be optionally compressed, trading off 2x space reduction vs 10x performance for access. Cleancache also has a sharing feature, which allows different nodes in a "virtual cluster" to share a local page cache. Tmem has some similarity to IBM''s Collaborative Memory Management, but creates more of a partnership between the kernel and the "privileged entity" and is not very invasive. Tmem may be applicable for KVM and containers; there is some disagreement on the extent of its value. Tmem is highly complementary to ballooning (aka page granularity hot plug) and memory deduplication (aka transparent content-based page sharing) but still has value when neither are present. Performance is difficult to quantify because some benchmarks respond very favorably to increases in memory and tmem may do quite well on those, depending on how much tmem is available which may vary widely and dynamically, depending on conditions completely outside of the system being measured. Ideas on how best to provide useful metrics would be appreciated. Tmem is supported starting in Xen 4.0 and is in Xen''s Linux 2.6.18-xen source tree. It is also released as a technology preview in Oracle''s Xen-based virtualization product, Oracle VM 2.2. Again, Xen is not necessarily a requirement, but currently provides the only existing implementation of tmem. Lots more information about tmem can be found at: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem and there was a talk about it on the first day of Linux Symposium in July 2009; an updated talk is planned at linux.conf.au in January 2010. Tmem is the result of a group effort, including Dan Magenheimer, Chris Mason, Dave McCracken, Kurt Hackel and Zhigang Wang, with helpful input from Jeremy Fitzhardinge, Keir Fraser, Ian Pratt, Sunil Mushran, Joel Becker, and Jan Beulich. THE TRANSCENDENT MEMORY API Transcendent memory is made up of a set of pools. Each pool is made up of a set of objects. And each object contains a set of pages. The combination of a 32-bit pool id, a 64-bit object id, and a 32-bit page id, uniquely identify a page of tmem data, and this tuple is called a "handle." Commonly, the three parts of a handle are used to address a filesystem, a file within that filesystem, and a page within that file; however an OS can use any values as long as they uniquely identify a page of data. When a tmem pool is created, it is given certain attributes: It can be private or shared, and it can be persistent or ephemeral. Each combination of these attributes provides a different set of useful functionality and also defines a slightly different set of semantics for the various operations on the pool. Other pool attributes include the size of the page and a version number. Once a pool is created, operations are performed on the pool. Pages are copied between the OS and tmem and are addressed using a handle. Pages and/or objects may also be flushed from the pool. When all operations are completed, a pool can be destroyed. The specific tmem functions are called in Linux through a set of accessor functions: int (*new_pool)(struct tmem_pool_uuid uuid, u32 flags); int (*destroy_pool)(u32 pool_id); int (*put_page)(u32 pool_id, u64 object, u32 index, unsigned long pfn); int (*get_page)(u32 pool_id, u64 object, u32 index, unsigned long pfn); int (*flush_page)(u32 pool_id, u64 object, u32 index); int (*flush_object)(u32 pool_id, u64 object); The new_pool accessor creates a new pool and returns a pool id which is a non-negative 32-bit integer. If the flags parameter specifies that the pool is to be shared, the uuid is a 128-bit "shared secret" else it is ignored. The destroy_pool accessor destroys the pool. (Note: shared pools are not supported until security implications are better understood.) The put_page accessor copies a page of data from the specified pageframe and associates it with the specified handle. The get_page accessor looks up a page of data in tmem associated with the specified handle and, if found, copies it to the specified pageframe. The flush_page accessor ensures that subsequent gets of a page with the specified handle will fail. The flush_object accessor ensures that subsequent gets of any page matching the pool id and object will fail. There are many subtle but critical behaviors for get_page and put_page: - Any put_page (with one notable exception) may be rejected and the client must be prepared to deal with that failure. A put_page copies, NOT moves, data; that is the data exists in both places. Linux is responsible for destroying or overwriting its own copy, or alternately managing any coherency between the copies. - Every page successfully put to a persistent pool must be found by a subsequent get_page that specifies the same handle. A page successfully put to an ephemeral pool has an indeterminate lifetime and even an immediately subsequent get_page may fail. - A get_page to a private pool is destructive, that is it behaves as if the get_page were atomically followed by a flush_page. A get_page to a shared pool is non-destructive. A flush_page behaves just like a get_page to a private pool except the data is thrown away. - Put-put-get coherency is guaranteed. For example, after the sequence: put_page(ABC,D1); put_page(ABC,D2); get_page(ABC,E) E may never contain the data from D1. However, even for a persistent pool, the get_page may fail if the second put_page indicates failure. - Get-get coherency is guaranteed. For example, in the sequence: put_page(ABC,D); get_page(ABC,E1); get_page(ABC,E2) if the first get_page fails, the second must also fail. - A tmem implementation provides no serialization guarantees (e.g. to an SMP Linux). So if different Linux threads are putting and flushing the same page, the results are indeterminate. _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-21 23:46 UTC
[Xen-devel] RE: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
> From: Nitin Gupta [mailto:ngupta@vflare.org]> Hi Dan,Hi Nitin -- Thanks for your review!> (I''m not sure if gmane.org interface sends mail to everyone > in CC list, so > sending again. Sorry if you are getting duplicate mail).FWIW, I only got this one copy (at least so far)!> I really like the idea of allocating cache memory from > hypervisor directly. This > is much more flexible than assigning fixed size memory to guests.Thanks!> I think ''frontswap'' part seriously overlaps the functionality > provided by ''ramzswap''Could be, but I suspect there''s a subtle difference. A key part of the tmem frontswap api is that any "put" at any time can be rejected. There''s no way for the kernel to know a priori whether the put will be rejected or not, and the kernel must be able to react by writing the page to a "true" swap device and must keep track of which pages were put to tmem frontswap and which were written to disk. As a result, tmem frontswap cannot be configured or used as a true swap "device". This is critical to acheive the flexibility you commented above that you like. Only the hypervisor knows if a free page is available "now" because it is flexibly managing tmem requests from multiple guest kernels. If my understanding of ramzswap is incorrect or you have some clever solution that I misunderstood, please let me know.>> Cleancache is > > "ephemeral" so whether a page is kept in cleancache > (between the "put" and > > the "get") is dependent on a number of factors that are invisible to > > the kernel. > > Just an idea: as an alternate approach, we can create an > ''in-memory compressed > storage'' backend for FS-Cache. This way, all filesystems > modified to use > fs-cache can benefit from this backend. To make it > virtualization friendly like > tmem, we can again provide (per-cache?) option to allocate > from hypervisor i.e. > tmem_{put,get}_page() or use [compress]+alloc natively.I looked at FS-Cache and cachefiles and thought I understood that it is not restricted to clean pages only, thus not a good match for tmem cleancache. Again, if I''m wrong (or if it is easy to tell FS-Cache that pages may "disappear" underneath it), let me know. BTW, pages put to tmem (both frontswap and cleancache) can be optionally compressed.> For guest<-->hypervisor interface, maybe we can use virtio so that all > hypervisors can benefit? Not quite sure about this one.I''m not very familiar with virtio, but the existence of "I/O" in the name concerns me because tmem is entirely synchronous. Also, tmem is well-layered so very little work needs to be done on the Linux side for other hypervisors to benefit. Of course these other hypervisors would need to implement the hypervisor-side of tmem as well, but there is a well-defined API to guide other hypervisor-side implementations... and the opensource tmem code in Xen has a clear split between the hypervisor-dependent and hypervisor-independent code, which should simplify implementation for other opensource hypervisors. I realize in "Take 3" I didn''t provide the URL for more information: http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-23 17:15 UTC
[Xen-devel] RE: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
> As I mentioned, I really like the idea behind tmem. All I am proposing > is that we should probably explore some alternatives to achive this using > some existing infrastructure in kernel.Hi Nitin -- Sorry if I sounded overly negative... too busy around the holidays. I''m definitely OK with exploring alternatives. I just think that existing kernel mechanisms are very firmly rooted in the notion that either the kernel owns the memory/cache or an asynchronous device owns it. Tmem falls somewhere in between and is very carefully designed to maximize memory flexibility *outside* of the kernel -- across all guests in a virtualized environment -- with minimal impact to the kernel, while still providing the kernel with the ability to use -- but not own, directly address, or control -- additional memory when conditions allow. And these conditions are not only completely invisible to the kernel, but change frequently and asynchronously from the kernel, unlike most external devices for which the kernel can "reserve" space and use it asynchronously later. Maybe ramzswap and FS-cache could be augmented to have similar advantages in a virtualized environment, but I suspect they''d end up with something very similar to tmem. Since the objective of both is to optimize memory that IS owned (used, directly addressable, and controlled) by the kernel, they are entirely complementary with tmem.> Is synchronous working a *requirement* for tmem to work correctly?Yes. Asynchronous behavior would introduce lots of race conditions between the hypervisor and kernel which would greatly increase complexity and reduce performance. And tmem then essentially becomes an I/O device, which defeats its purpose, especially compared to a fast SSD.> Swapping to hypervisor is mainly useful to overcome > ''static partitioning'' problem you mentioned in article: > http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/ > ...such ''para-swap'' can shrink/expand outside of VM constraints.Frontswap is very different than "hypervisor swapping" as what''s done by VMware as a side-effect of transparent page-sharing. With frontswap, the kernel still decides which pages are swapped out. If frontswap says there is space, the swap goes "fast" to tmem; if not, the kernel writes it to its own swapdisk. So there''s no "double paging" or random page selection/swapping. On the downside, kernels must have real swap configured and, to avoid DoS issues, frontswap is limited by the same constraint as ballooning (ie. can NOT expand outside of VM constraints). Thanks, Dan P.S. If you want to look at implementing FS-cache or ramzswap on top of tmem, I''d be happy to help, but I''ll bet your concern:> we might later encounter some hidder/dangerous problems :)will prove to be correct.> -----Original Message----- > From: Nitin Gupta [mailto:ngupta@vflare.org] > Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2009 11:28 PM > To: Dan Magenheimer > Cc: Nick Piggin; Andrew Morton; jeremy@goop.org; > xen-devel@lists.xensource.com; tmem-devel@oss.oracle.com; > Rusty Russell; > Rik van Riel; Dave Mccracken; Sunil Mushran; Avi Kivity; Schwidefsky; > Balbir Singh; Marcelo Tosatti; Alan Cox; Chris Mason; Pavel Machek; > linux-mm; linux-kernel > Subject: Re: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory > > > Hi Dan, > > (mail to Rusty [at] rcsinet15.oracle.com was failing, so I removed > this address from CC list). > > On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 5:16 AM, Dan Magenheimer > <dan.magenheimer@oracle.com> wrote: > >> From: Nitin Gupta [mailto:ngupta@vflare.org] > > > > >> I think ''frontswap'' part seriously overlaps the functionality > >> provided by ''ramzswap'' > > > > Could be, but I suspect there''s a subtle difference. > > A key part of the tmem frontswap api is that any > > "put" at any time can be rejected. There''s no way > > for the kernel to know a priori whether the put > > will be rejected or not, and the kernel must be able > > to react by writing the page to a "true" swap device > > and must keep track of which pages were put > > to tmem frontswap and which were written to disk. > > As a result, tmem frontswap cannot be configured or > > used as a true swap "device". > > > > This is critical to acheive the flexibility you > > commented above that you like. Only the hypervisor > > knows if a free page is available "now" because > > it is flexibly managing tmem requests from multiple > > guest kernels. > > > > ramzswap devices can easily track which pages it sent > to hypervisor, which pages are in backing swap (physical) disk > and which are in (compressed) memory. Its simply a matter > of adding some more flags. Latter two are already done in this > driver. > > So, to gain flexibility of frontswap, we can have hypervisor > send the driver a callback whenever it wants to discard swap > pages under its domain. If you want to avoid even this callback, > then kernel will have to keep a copy within guest, which I think > defeats the whole purpose of swapping to hypervisor. Such > "ephemeral" pools should be used only for clean fs cache and > not for swap. > > Swapping to hypervisor is mainly useful to overcome > ''static partitioning'' problem you mentioned in article: > http://oss.oracle.com/projects/tmem/ > ...such ''para-swap'' can shrink/expand outside of VM constraints. > > > > > >>> Cleancache is > >> > "ephemeral" so whether a page is kept in cleancache > >> (between the "put" and > >> > the "get") is dependent on a number of factors that are > invisible to > >> > the kernel. > >> > >> Just an idea: as an alternate approach, we can create an > >> ''in-memory compressed > >> storage'' backend for FS-Cache. This way, all filesystems > >> modified to use > >> fs-cache can benefit from this backend. To make it > >> virtualization friendly like > >> tmem, we can again provide (per-cache?) option to allocate > >> from hypervisor i.e. > >> tmem_{put,get}_page() or use [compress]+alloc natively. > > > > I looked at FS-Cache and cachefiles and thought I understood > > that it is not restricted to clean pages only, thus > > not a good match for tmem cleancache. > > > > Again, if I''m wrong (or if it is easy to tell FS-Cache that > > pages may "disappear" underneath it), let me know. > > > > fs-cache backend can keep ''dirty'' pages within guest and forward > clean pages to hypervisor. These clean pages can be added to > ephemeral pools which can be reclaimed at any time by hypervisor. > BTW, I have not yet started work on any such fs-cache backend, so > we might later encounter some hidder/dangerous problems :) > > > > BTW, pages put to tmem (both frontswap and cleancache) can > > be optionally compressed. > > > > If ramzswap is extended for this virtualization case, then enforcing > compression might not be good. We can then throw out pages to hvisor > even before compression stage. All such changes to ramzswap are IMHO > pretty straight forward to do. > > > >> For guest<-->hypervisor interface, maybe we can use virtio > so that all > >> hypervisors can benefit? Not quite sure about this one. > > > > I''m not very familiar with virtio, but the existence of "I/O" > > in the name concerns me because tmem is entirely synchronous. > > > > Is synchronous working a *requirement* for tmem to work correctly? > > > > Also, tmem is well-layered so very little work needs to be > > done on the Linux side for other hypervisors to benefit. > > Of course these other hypervisors would need to implement > > the hypervisor-side of tmem as well, but there is a well-defined > > API to guide other hypervisor-side implementations... and the > > opensource tmem code in Xen has a clear split between the > > hypervisor-dependent and hypervisor-independent code, which > > should simplify implementation for other opensource hypervisors. > > > > As I mentioned, I really like the idea behind tmem. All I am proposing > is that we should probably explore some alternatives to > achive this using > some existing infrastructure in kernel. I also don''t have > experience working > on virtio[1] or virtual-bus[2] but I have the feeling that once guest > to hvisor channels are created, both ramzswap extension and > fs-cache backend > can share the same code. > > [1] virtio: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1400097.1400108 > [2] virtual-bus:http://developer.novell.com/wiki/index.php/Virtual-bus Thanks, Nitin _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-24 20:51 UTC
[Xen-devel] RE: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
> What we want is surely tmem but attempt is to better integrate with > existing infrastructure. Please give me few days as I try to develop > a prototype.Sounds good. I have a few more comments but will switch to cc''ing just the tmem-devel* list as most people and lists are probably not interested in this level of detail, but it will be archived on tmem-devel in case anyone else does want to follow it. Thanks, Dan * http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/tmem-devel/ _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Pavel Machek
2009-Dec-25 19:18 UTC
[Xen-devel] Re: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
On Wed 2009-12-23 09:15:27, Dan Magenheimer wrote:> > As I mentioned, I really like the idea behind tmem. All I am proposing > > is that we should probably explore some alternatives to achive this using > > some existing infrastructure in kernel. > > Hi Nitin -- > > Sorry if I sounded overly negative... too busy around the holidays. > > I''m definitely OK with exploring alternatives. I just think that > existing kernel mechanisms are very firmly rooted in the notion > that either the kernel owns the memory/cache or an asynchronous > device owns it. Tmem falls somewhere in between and is veryWell... compcache seems to be very similar to preswap: in preswap case you don''t know if hypervisor will have space, in ramzswap you don''t know if data are compressible. Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-28 15:57 UTC
[Xen-devel] RE: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
> From: Pavel Machek [mailto:pavel@ucw.cz] > > > As I mentioned, I really like the idea behind tmem. All I > am proposing > > > is that we should probably explore some alternatives to > achive this using > > > some existing infrastructure in kernel. > > > > Hi Nitin -- > > > > Sorry if I sounded overly negative... too busy around the holidays. > > > > I''m definitely OK with exploring alternatives. I just think that > > existing kernel mechanisms are very firmly rooted in the notion > > that either the kernel owns the memory/cache or an asynchronous > > device owns it. Tmem falls somewhere in between and is very > > Well... compcache seems to be very similar to preswap: in preswap case > you don''t know if hypervisor will have space, in ramzswap you don''t > know if data are compressible.Hi Pavel -- Yes there are definitely similarities too. In fact, I started prototyping preswap (now called frontswap) with Nitin''s compcache code. IIRC I ran into some problems with compcache''s difficulties in dealing with failed "puts" due to dynamic changes in size of hypervisor-available-memory. Nitin may have addressed this in later versions of ramzswap. One feature of frontswap which is different than ramzswap is that frontswap acts as a "fronting store" for all configured swap devices, including SAN/NAS swap devices. It doesn''t need to be separately configured as a "highest priority" swap device. In many installations and depending on how ramzswap is configured, this difference probably doesn''t make much difference though. Thanks, Dan _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Pavel Machek
2009-Dec-28 20:51 UTC
[Xen-devel] Re: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
Hi!> > achive this using > > > > some existing infrastructure in kernel. > > > > > > Hi Nitin -- > > > > > > Sorry if I sounded overly negative... too busy around the holidays. > > > > > > I''m definitely OK with exploring alternatives. I just think that > > > existing kernel mechanisms are very firmly rooted in the notion > > > that either the kernel owns the memory/cache or an asynchronous > > > device owns it. Tmem falls somewhere in between and is very > > > > Well... compcache seems to be very similar to preswap: in preswap case > > you don''t know if hypervisor will have space, in ramzswap you don''t > > know if data are compressible. > > Hi Pavel -- > > Yes there are definitely similarities too. In fact, I started > prototyping preswap (now called frontswap) with Nitin''s > compcache code. IIRC I ran into some problems with compcache''s > difficulties in dealing with failed "puts" due to dynamic > changes in size of hypervisor-available-memory. > > Nitin may have addressed this in later versions of ramzswap.That would be cool to find out.> One feature of frontswap which is different than ramzswap is > that frontswap acts as a "fronting store" for all configured > swap devices, including SAN/NAS swap devices. It doesn''t > need to be separately configured as a "highest priority" swap > device. In many installations and depending on how ramzswapOk, I''d call it a bug, not a feature :-). Pavel -- (english) http://www.livejournal.com/~pavelmachek (cesky, pictures) http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/picture/horses/blog.html _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
Dan Magenheimer
2009-Dec-28 21:41 UTC
[Xen-devel] RE: Tmem [PATCH 0/5] (Take 3): Transcendent memory
> > One feature of frontswap which is different than ramzswap is > > that frontswap acts as a "fronting store" for all configured > > swap devices, including SAN/NAS swap devices. It doesn''t > > need to be separately configured as a "highest priority" swap > > device. In many installations and depending on how ramzswap > > Ok, I''d call it a bug, not a feature :-). > PavelI agree it has little value (or might be considered a bug) when managing Linux on a physical machine. But when Linux is running in a virtual machine, it''s one less thing that a sysadmin needs to understand and configure. _______________________________________________ Xen-devel mailing list Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel