Re: [PATCH] [staging][zram] Fix handling of incompressible pages

From: Greg KH
Date: Mon Oct 22 2012 - 16:43:02 EST


On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 05:42:18PM -0700, Nitin Gupta wrote:
> Change 130f315a (staging: zram: remove special handle of uncompressed page)
> introduced a bug in the handling of incompressible pages which resulted in
> memory allocation failure for such pages.
>
> When a page expands on compression, say from 4K to 4K+30, we were trying to
> do zsmalloc(pool, 4K+30). However, the maximum size which zsmalloc can
> allocate is PAGE_SIZE (for obvious reasons), so such allocation requests
> always return failure (0).
>
> For a page that has compressed size larger than the original size (this may
> happen with already compressed or random data), there is no point storing
> the compressed version as that would take more space and would also require
> time for decompression when needed again. So, the fix is to store any page,
> whose compressed size exceeds a threshold (max_zpage_size), as-it-is i.e.
> without compression. Memory required for storing this uncompressed page can
> then be requested from zsmalloc which supports PAGE_SIZE sized allocations.
>
> Lastly, the fix checks that we do not attempt to "decompress" the page which
> we stored in the uncompressed form -- we just memcpy() out such pages.

So this fix needs to go to the stable 3.6 release also, right?

thanks,

greg k-h
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