zswap¶
Overview¶
Zswap is a lightweight compressed cache for swap pages. It takes pages that are in the process of being swapped out and attempts to compress them into a dynamically allocated RAM-based memory pool. zswap basically trades CPU cycles for potentially reduced swap I/O. This trade-off can also result in a significant performance improvement if reads from the compressed cache are faster than reads from a swap device.
Some potential benefits:
Desktop/laptop users with limited RAM capacities can mitigate the performance impact of swapping.
Overcommitted guests that share a common I/O resource can dramatically reduce their swap I/O pressure, avoiding heavy handed I/O throttling by the hypervisor. This allows more work to get done with less impact to the guest workload and guests sharing the I/O subsystem
Users with SSDs as swap devices can extend the life of the device by drastically reducing life-shortening writes.
Zswap evicts pages from compressed cache on an LRU basis to the backing swap device when the compressed pool reaches its size limit. This requirement had been identified in prior community discussions.
Whether Zswap is enabled at the boot time depends on whether
the CONFIG_ZSWAP_DEFAULT_ON
Kconfig option is enabled or not.
This setting can then be overridden by providing the kernel command line
zswap.enabled=
option, for example zswap.enabled=0
.
Zswap can also be enabled and disabled at runtime using the sysfs interface.
An example command to enable zswap at runtime, assuming sysfs is mounted
at /sys
, is:
echo 1 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/enabled
When zswap is disabled at runtime it will stop storing pages that are being swapped out. However, it will _not_ immediately write out or fault back into memory all of the pages stored in the compressed pool. The pages stored in zswap will remain in the compressed pool until they are either invalidated or faulted back into memory. In order to force all pages out of the compressed pool, a swapoff on the swap device(s) will fault back into memory all swapped out pages, including those in the compressed pool.
Design¶
Zswap receives pages for compression through the Frontswap API and is able to evict pages from its own compressed pool on an LRU basis and write them back to the backing swap device in the case that the compressed pool is full.
Zswap makes use of zpool for the managing the compressed memory pool. Each
allocation in zpool is not directly accessible by address. Rather, a handle is
returned by the allocation routine and that handle must be mapped before being
accessed. The compressed memory pool grows on demand and shrinks as compressed
pages are freed. The pool is not preallocated. By default, a zpool
of type selected in CONFIG_ZSWAP_ZPOOL_DEFAULT
Kconfig option is created,
but it can be overridden at boot time by setting the zpool
attribute,
e.g. zswap.zpool=zbud
. It can also be changed at runtime using the sysfs
zpool
attribute, e.g.:
echo zbud > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/zpool
The zbud type zpool allocates exactly 1 page to store 2 compressed pages, which means the compression ratio will always be 2:1 or worse (because of half-full zbud pages). The zsmalloc type zpool has a more complex compressed page storage method, and it can achieve greater storage densities.
When a swap page is passed from frontswap to zswap, zswap maintains a mapping of the swap entry, a combination of the swap type and swap offset, to the zpool handle that references that compressed swap page. This mapping is achieved with a red-black tree per swap type. The swap offset is the search key for the tree nodes.
During a page fault on a PTE that is a swap entry, frontswap calls the zswap load function to decompress the page into the page allocated by the page fault handler.
Once there are no PTEs referencing a swap page stored in zswap (i.e. the count in the swap_map goes to 0) the swap code calls the zswap invalidate function, via frontswap, to free the compressed entry.
Zswap seeks to be simple in its policies. Sysfs attributes allow for one user controlled policy:
max_pool_percent - The maximum percentage of memory that the compressed pool can occupy.
The default compressor is selected in CONFIG_ZSWAP_COMPRESSOR_DEFAULT
Kconfig option, but it can be overridden at boot time by setting the
compressor
attribute, e.g. zswap.compressor=lzo
.
It can also be changed at runtime using the sysfs "compressor"
attribute, e.g.:
echo lzo > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/compressor
When the zpool and/or compressor parameter is changed at runtime, any existing compressed pages are not modified; they are left in their own zpool. When a request is made for a page in an old zpool, it is uncompressed using its original compressor. Once all pages are removed from an old zpool, the zpool and its compressor are freed.
Some of the pages in zswap are same-value filled pages (i.e. contents of the page have same value or repetitive pattern). These pages include zero-filled pages and they are handled differently. During store operation, a page is checked if it is a same-value filled page before compressing it. If true, the compressed length of the page is set to zero and the pattern or same-filled value is stored.
Same-value filled pages identification feature is enabled by default and can be
disabled at boot time by setting the same_filled_pages_enabled
attribute
to 0, e.g. zswap.same_filled_pages_enabled=0
. It can also be enabled and
disabled at runtime using the sysfs same_filled_pages_enabled
attribute, e.g.:
echo 1 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/same_filled_pages_enabled
When zswap same-filled page identification is disabled at runtime, it will stop checking for the same-value filled pages during store operation. In other words, every page will be then considered non-same-value filled. However, the existing pages which are marked as same-value filled pages remain stored unchanged in zswap until they are either loaded or invalidated.
In some circumstances it might be advantageous to make use of just the zswap
ability to efficiently store same-filled pages without enabling the whole
compressed page storage.
In this case the handling of non-same-value pages by zswap (enabled by default)
can be disabled by setting the non_same_filled_pages_enabled
attribute
to 0, e.g. zswap.non_same_filled_pages_enabled=0
.
It can also be enabled and disabled at runtime using the sysfs
non_same_filled_pages_enabled
attribute, e.g.:
echo 1 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/non_same_filled_pages_enabled
Disabling both zswap.same_filled_pages_enabled
and
zswap.non_same_filled_pages_enabled
effectively disables accepting any new
pages by zswap.
To prevent zswap from shrinking pool when zswap is full and there's a high
pressure on swap (this will result in flipping pages in and out zswap pool
without any real benefit but with a performance drop for the system), a
special parameter has been introduced to implement a sort of hysteresis to
refuse taking pages into zswap pool until it has sufficient space if the limit
has been hit. To set the threshold at which zswap would start accepting pages
again after it became full, use the sysfs accept_threshold_percent
attribute, e. g.:
echo 80 > /sys/module/zswap/parameters/accept_threshold_percent
Setting this parameter to 100 will disable the hysteresis.
A debugfs interface is provided for various statistic about pool size, number of pages stored, same-value filled pages and various counters for the reasons pages are rejected.