Re: [PATCH] mm: reuse the unshared swapcache page in do_wp_page

From: David Hildenbrand
Date: Fri Jan 21 2022 - 04:01:25 EST


>>
>> I did hack something similar and it solved the problem, but I felt it is
>> a hack. If the thread is scheduled on another core, or if the write fault
>> is triggered by another thread it wouldn’t work.
>
> Yes, it will not match easily. One question would be how often it would
> help in practice and if it would be worth the price.
>


I did some more testing and I have to admit that your reproducer is
really good at finding corner cases.

Assume we try to handle LRU as discussed ... what I get is a delta
during the test: ./forceswap 2 100000 1


anon_wp_reuse 920
-> we were able to reuse
anon_wp_copy_count 0
-> we failed the final page_count() == 1 check
anon_wp_copy_count_early 634
-> we failed the early page_count() check considering swapcache and lru
anon_wp_copy_lock 1
-> we failed trylock
anon_wp_copy_lru 19
-> we failed to clear the lru cache reference
anon_wp_copy_writeback 99974
-> we failed to clear the swapcache reference due to concurrent
writeback
anon_wp_copy_swapcache 0
-> we failed to clear the swapcache reference for other reasons

So, yeah, we mostly always hit writeback in forceswap.c.
reuse_swap_page() would have been able to reuse the page if the swap
backend would have supported concurrent writes during writeback (IIUC,
zswap doesn't).

But I think triggering that case that often really is an oddity about
the test case.

--
Thanks,

David / dhildenb