linux-next/Documentation/vm/zswap.txt

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.

NOTE: Zswap is a new feature as of v3.11 and interacts heavily with memory
reclaim.  This interaction has not been fully explored on the large set of
potential configurations and workloads that exist.  For this reason, zswap
is a work in progress and should be considered experimental.

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.

Zswap is disabled by default but can be enabled at boot time by setting
the "enabled" attribute to 1 at boot time. ie: zswap.enabled=1.  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
zbud is created, but it can be selected 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.  However,
zsmalloc does not implement compressed page eviction, so once zswap fills it
cannot evict the oldest page, it can only reject new pages.

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 lzo, but it can be selected 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. However, the
existing pages which are marked as same-value filled pages remain stored
unchanged in zswap until they are either loaded or invalidated.

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.