[PATCH] fix swapcache packing in the radix tree
First some terminology: this patch introduces a kernel-wide `pgoff_t' type. It is the index of a page into the pagecache. The thing at page->index. For most mappings it is also the offset of the page into that mapping. This type has a very distinct function in the kernel and it needs a name. I don't have any particular plans to go and migrate everything so we can support 64-bit pagecache indices on x86, but this would be the way to do it. This patch improves the packing density of swapcache pages in the radix tree. A swapcache page is identified by the `swap type' (indexes the swap device) and the `offset' (into that swap device). These two numbers are encoded into a `swp_entry_t' machine word in arch-specific code because the resulting number is placed into pagetables in a form which will generate a fault. The kernel also need to generate a pgoff_t for that page to index it into the swapper_space radix tree. That pgoff_t is usually bitwise-identical to the swp_entry_t. That worked OK when the pagecache was using a hash. But with a radix tree, it produces catastrophically bad results. x86 (and many other architectures) place the `type' field into the low-order bits of the swp_entry_t. So *all* swapcache pages are basically identical in the eight low-order bits. This produces a very sparse radix tree for swapcache. I'm observing packing densities of 1% to 2%: so the typical 128-slot radix tree node has only one or two pages in it. The end result is that the kernel needs to allocate approximately one new radix-tree node for each page which is added to the swapcache. So no wonder we're having radix-tree node exhaustion during swapout! (It's actually quite encouraging that the kernel works as well as it does). The patch changes the encoding of the swp_entry_t so that its most-significant bits contain the `type' field and the least-significant bits contain the `offset' field, right-aligned. That is: the encoding in swp_entry_t is now arch-independent. The new file <linux/swapops.h> has conversion functions which convert the swp_entry_t to and from its machine pte representation. Packing density in the swapper_space mapping goes up to around 90% (observed) and the kernel is tons happier under swap load. An alternative approach would be to create new conversion functions which convert an arch-specific swp_entry_t to and from a pgoff_t. I tried that. It worked, but I liked it less.
Showing
include/linux/swapops.h
0 → 100644
Please register or sign in to comment