Considering the use cases where the swap device supports discard:
a) and can do it quickly;
b) but it's slow to do in small granularities (or concurrent with other
I/O);
c) but the implementation is so horrendous that you don't even want to
send one down;
And assuming that the sysadmin considers it useful to send the discards down
at all, we would (probably) want the following solutions:
i. do the fine-grained discards for freed swap pages, if device is
capable of doing so optimally;
ii. do single-time (batched) swap area discards, either at swapon
or via something like fstrim (not implemented yet);
iii. allow doing both single-time and fine-grained discards; or
iv. turn it off completely (default behavior)
As implemented today, one can only enable/disable discards for swap, but
one cannot select, for instance, solution (ii) on a swap device like (b)
even though the single-time discard is regarded to be interesting, or
necessary to the workload because it would imply (1), and the device is
not capable of performing it optimally.
This patch addresses the scenario depicted above by introducing a way to
ensure the (probably) wanted solutions (i, ii, iii and iv) can be flexibly
flagged through swapon(8) to allow a sysadmin to select the best suitable
swap discard policy accordingly to system constraints.
This patch introduces SWAP_FLAG_DISCARD_PAGES and SWAP_FLAG_DISCARD_ONCE
new flags to allow more flexibe swap discard policies being flagged
through swapon(8). The default behavior is to keep both single-time, or
batched, area discards (SWAP_FLAG_DISCARD_ONCE) and fine-grained discards
for page-clusters (SWAP_FLAG_DISCARD_PAGES) enabled, in order to keep
consistentcy with older kernel behavior, as well as maintain compatibility
with older swapon(8). However, through the new introduced flags the best
suitable discard policy can be selected accordingly to any given swap
device constraint.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: tweak comments]
Signed-off-by: Rafael Aquini <aquini@redhat.com>
Acked-by: KOSAKI Motohiro <kosaki.motohiro@jp.fujitsu.com>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Karel Zak <kzak@redhat.com>
Cc: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Larry Woodman <lwoodman@redhat.com>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mel@csn.ul.ie>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
dcf6b7ddd7