The writeback interface supports a page_index=N parameter which performs
writeback of the given page. Since we rarely need to writeback just one
single page, the typical use case involves a number of writeback calls,
each performing writeback of one page:
echo page_index=100 > zram0/writeback
...
echo page_index=200 > zram0/writeback
echo page_index=500 > zram0/writeback
...
echo page_index=700 > zram0/writeback
One obvious downside of this is that it increases the number of syscalls.
Less obvious, but a significantly more important downside, is that when
given only one page to post-process zram cannot perform an optimal target
selection. This becomes a critical limitation when writeback_limit is
enabled, because under writeback_limit we want to guarantee the highest
memory savings hence we first need to writeback pages that release the
highest amount of zsmalloc pool memory.
This patch adds page_indexes=LOW-HIGH parameter to the writeback
interface:
echo page_indexes=100-200 page_indexes=500-700 > zram0/writeback
This gives zram a chance to apply an optimal target selection strategy on
each iteration of the writeback loop.
We also now permit multiple page_index parameters per call (previously
zram would recognize only one page_index) and a mix or single pages and
page ranges:
echo page_index=42 page_index=99 page_indexes=100-200 \
page_indexes=500-700 > zram0/writeback
Apart from that the patch also unifies parameters passing and resembles
other "modern" zram device attributes (e.g. recompression), while the old
interface used a mixed scheme: values-less parameters for mode and a
key=value format for page_index. We still support the "old" value-less
format for compatibility reasons.
[senozhatsky@chromium.org: simplify parse_page_index() range checks, per Brian]
nk: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250404015327.2427684-1-senozhatsky@chromium.org
[sozhatsky@chromium.org: fix uninitialized variable in zram_writeback_slots(), per Dan]
nk: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250409112611.1154282-1-senozhatsky@chromium.org
Link: https://lkml.kernel.org/r/20250327015818.4148660-1-senozhatsky@chromium.org
Signed-off-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@chromium.org>
Reviewed-by: Brian Geffon <bgeffon@google.com>
Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Richard Chang <richardycc@google.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <senozhatsky@chromium.org>
Cc: Dan Carpenter <dan.carpenter@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
cf42d4cccf