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 .. _frontswap:
 
 =========
 Frontswap
 =========
 
 Frontswap provides a "transcendent memory" interface for swap pages.
 In some environments, dramatic performance savings may be obtained because
 swapped pages are saved in RAM (or a RAM-like device) instead of a swap disk.
 
 .. _Transcendent memory in a nutshell: https://lwn.net/Articles/454795/
 
 Frontswap is so named because it can be thought of as the opposite of
 a "backing" store for a swap device.  The storage is assumed to be
 a synchronous concurrency-safe page-oriented "pseudo-RAM device" conforming
 to the requirements of transcendent memory (such as Xen's "tmem", or
 in-kernel compressed memory, aka "zcache", or future RAM-like devices);
 this pseudo-RAM device is not directly accessible or addressable by the
 kernel and is of unknown and possibly time-varying size.  The driver
 links itself to frontswap by calling frontswap_register_ops to set the
 frontswap_ops funcs appropriately and the functions it provides must
 conform to certain policies as follows:
 
 An "init" prepares the device to receive frontswap pages associated
 with the specified swap device number (aka "type").  A "store" will
 copy the page to transcendent memory and associate it with the type and
 offset associated with the page. A "load" will copy the page, if found,
 from transcendent memory into kernel memory, but will NOT remove the page
 from transcendent memory.  An "invalidate_page" will remove the page
 from transcendent memory and an "invalidate_area" will remove ALL pages
 associated with the swap type (e.g., like swapoff) and notify the "device"
 to refuse further stores with that swap type.
 
 Once a page is successfully stored, a matching load on the page will normally
 succeed.  So when the kernel finds itself in a situation where it needs
 to swap out a page, it first attempts to use frontswap.  If the store returns
 success, the data has been successfully saved to transcendent memory and
 a disk write and, if the data is later read back, a disk read are avoided.
 If a store returns failure, transcendent memory has rejected the data, and the
 page can be written to swap as usual.
 
 Note that if a page is stored and the page already exists in transcendent memory
 (a "duplicate" store), either the store succeeds and the data is overwritten,
 or the store fails AND the page is invalidated.  This ensures stale data may
 never be obtained from frontswap.
 
 If properly configured, monitoring of frontswap is done via debugfs in
 the `/sys/kernel/debug/frontswap` directory.  The effectiveness of
 frontswap can be measured (across all swap devices) with:
 
 ``failed_stores``
         how many store attempts have failed
 
 ``loads``
         how many loads were attempted (all should succeed)
 
 ``succ_stores``
         how many store attempts have succeeded
 
 ``invalidates``
         how many invalidates were attempted
 
 A backend implementation may provide additional metrics.
 
 FAQ
 ===
 
 * Where's the value?
 
 When a workload starts swapping, performance falls through the floor.
 Frontswap significantly increases performance in many such workloads by
 providing a clean, dynamic interface to read and write swap pages to
 "transcendent memory" that is otherwise not directly addressable to the kernel.
 This interface is ideal when data is transformed to a different form
 and size (such as with compression) or secretly moved (as might be
 useful for write-balancing for some RAM-like devices).  Swap pages (and
 evicted page-cache pages) are a great use for this kind of slower-than-RAM-
 but-much-faster-than-disk "pseudo-RAM device".
 
 Frontswap with a fairly small impact on the kernel,
 provides a huge amount of flexibility for more dynamic, flexible RAM
 utilization in various system configurations:
 
 In the single kernel case, aka "zcache", pages are compressed and
 stored in local memory, thus increasing the total anonymous pages
 that can be safely kept in RAM.  Zcache essentially trades off CPU
 cycles used in compression/decompression for better memory utilization.
 Benchmarks have shown little or no impact when memory pressure is
 low while providing a significant performance improvement (25%+)
 on some workloads under high memory pressure.
 
 "RAMster" builds on zcache by adding "peer-to-peer" transcendent memory
 support for clustered systems.  Frontswap pages are locally compressed
 as in zcache, but then "remotified" to another system's RAM.  This
 allows RAM to be dynamically load-balanced back-and-forth as needed,
 i.e. when system A is overcommitted, it can swap to system B, and
 vice versa.  RAMster can also be configured as a memory server so
 many servers in a cluster can swap, dynamically as needed, to a single
 server configured with a large amount of RAM... without pre-configuring
 how much of the RAM is available for each of the clients!
 
 In the virtual case, the whole point of virtualization is to statistically
 multiplex physical resources across the varying demands of multiple
 virtual machines.  This is really hard to do with RAM and efforts to do
 it well with no kernel changes have essentially failed (except in some
 well-publicized special-case workloads).
 Specifically, the Xen Transcendent Memory backend allows otherwise
 "fallow" hypervisor-owned RAM to not only be "time-shared" between multiple
 virtual machines, but the pages can be compressed and deduplicated to
 optimize RAM utilization.  And when guest OS's are induced to surrender
 underutilized RAM (e.g. with "selfballooning"), sudden unexpected
 memory pressure may result in swapping; frontswap allows those pages
 to be swapped to and from hypervisor RAM (if overall host system memory
 conditions allow), thus mitigating the potentially awful performance impact
 of unplanned swapping.
 
 A KVM implementation is underway and has been RFC'ed to lkml.  And,
 using frontswap, investigation is also underway on the use of NVM as
 a memory extension technology.
 
 * Sure there may be performance advantages in some situations, but
   what's the space/time overhead of frontswap?
 
 If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is disabled, every frontswap hook compiles into
 nothingness and the only overhead is a few extra bytes per swapon'ed
 swap device.  If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled but no frontswap "backend"
 registers, there is one extra global variable compared to zero for
 every swap page read or written.  If CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled
 AND a frontswap backend registers AND the backend fails every "store"
 request (i.e. provides no memory despite claiming it might),
 CPU overhead is still negligible -- and since every frontswap fail
 precedes a swap page write-to-disk, the system is highly likely
 to be I/O bound and using a small fraction of a percent of a CPU
 will be irrelevant anyway.
 
 As for space, if CONFIG_FRONTSWAP is enabled AND a frontswap backend
 registers, one bit is allocated for every swap page for every swap
 device that is swapon'd.  This is added to the EIGHT bits (which
 was sixteen until about 2.6.34) that the kernel already allocates
 for every swap page for every swap device that is swapon'd.  (Hugh
 Dickins has observed that frontswap could probably steal one of
 the existing eight bits, but let's worry about that minor optimization
 later.)  For very large swap disks (which are rare) on a standard
 4K pagesize, this is 1MB per 32GB swap.
 
 When swap pages are stored in transcendent memory instead of written
 out to disk, there is a side effect that this may create more memory
 pressure that can potentially outweigh the other advantages.  A
 backend, such as zcache, must implement policies to carefully (but
 dynamically) manage memory limits to ensure this doesn't happen.
 
 * OK, how about a quick overview of what this frontswap patch does
   in terms that a kernel hacker can grok?
 
 Let's assume that a frontswap "backend" has registered during
 kernel initialization; this registration indicates that this
 frontswap backend has access to some "memory" that is not directly
 accessible by the kernel.  Exactly how much memory it provides is
 entirely dynamic and random.
 
 Whenever a swap-device is swapon'd frontswap_init() is called,
 passing the swap device number (aka "type") as a parameter.
 This notifies frontswap to expect attempts to "store" swap pages
 associated with that number.
 
 Whenever the swap subsystem is readying a page to write to a swap
 device (c.f swap_writepage()), frontswap_store is called.  Frontswap
 consults with the frontswap backend and if the backend says it does NOT
 have room, frontswap_store returns -1 and the kernel swaps the page
 to the swap device as normal.  Note that the response from the frontswap
 backend is unpredictable to the kernel; it may choose to never accept a
 page, it could accept every ninth page, or it might accept every
 page.  But if the backend does accept a page, the data from the page
 has already been copied and associated with the type and offset,
 and the backend guarantees the persistence of the data.  In this case,
 frontswap sets a bit in the "frontswap_map" for the swap device
 corresponding to the page offset on the swap device to which it would
 otherwise have written the data.
 
 When the swap subsystem needs to swap-in a page (swap_readpage()),
 it first calls frontswap_load() which checks the frontswap_map to
 see if the page was earlier accepted by the frontswap backend.  If
 it was, the page of data is filled from the frontswap backend and
 the swap-in is complete.  If not, the normal swap-in code is
 executed to obtain the page of data from the real swap device.
 
 So every time the frontswap backend accepts a page, a swap device read
 and (potentially) a swap device write are replaced by a "frontswap backend
 store" and (possibly) a "frontswap backend loads", which are presumably much
 faster.
 
 * Can't frontswap be configured as a "special" swap device that is
   just higher priority than any real swap device (e.g. like zswap,
   or maybe swap-over-nbd/NFS)?
 
 No.  First, the existing swap subsystem doesn't allow for any kind of
 swap hierarchy.  Perhaps it could be rewritten to accommodate a hierarchy,
 but this would require fairly drastic changes.  Even if it were
 rewritten, the existing swap subsystem uses the block I/O layer which
 assumes a swap device is fixed size and any page in it is linearly
 addressable.  Frontswap barely touches the existing swap subsystem,
 and works around the constraints of the block I/O subsystem to provide
 a great deal of flexibility and dynamicity.
 
 For example, the acceptance of any swap page by the frontswap backend is
 entirely unpredictable. This is critical to the definition of frontswap
 backends because it grants completely dynamic discretion to the
 backend.  In zcache, one cannot know a priori how compressible a page is.
 "Poorly" compressible pages can be rejected, and "poorly" can itself be
 defined dynamically depending on current memory constraints.
 
 Further, frontswap is entirely synchronous whereas a real swap
 device is, by definition, asynchronous and uses block I/O.  The
 block I/O layer is not only unnecessary, but may perform "optimizations"
 that are inappropriate for a RAM-oriented device including delaying
 the write of some pages for a significant amount of time.  Synchrony is
 required to ensure the dynamicity of the backend and to avoid thorny race
 conditions that would unnecessarily and greatly complicate frontswap
 and/or the block I/O subsystem.  That said, only the initial "store"
 and "load" operations need be synchronous.  A separate asynchronous thread
 is free to manipulate the pages stored by frontswap.  For example,
 the "remotification" thread in RAMster uses standard asynchronous
 kernel sockets to move compressed frontswap pages to a remote machine.
 Similarly, a KVM guest-side implementation could do in-guest compression
 and use "batched" hypercalls.
 
 In a virtualized environment, the dynamicity allows the hypervisor
 (or host OS) to do "intelligent overcommit".  For example, it can
 choose to accept pages only until host-swapping might be imminent,
 then force guests to do their own swapping.
 
 There is a downside to the transcendent memory specifications for
 frontswap:  Since any "store" might fail, there must always be a real
 slot on a real swap device to swap the page.  Thus frontswap must be
 implemented as a "shadow" to every swapon'd device with the potential
 capability of holding every page that the swap device might have held
 and the possibility that it might hold no pages at all.  This means
 that frontswap cannot contain more pages than the total of swapon'd
 swap devices.  For example, if NO swap device is configured on some
 installation, frontswap is useless.  Swapless portable devices
 can still use frontswap but a backend for such devices must configure
 some kind of "ghost" swap device and ensure that it is never used.
 
 * Why this weird definition about "duplicate stores"?  If a page
   has been previously successfully stored, can't it always be
   successfully overwritten?
 
 Nearly always it can, but no, sometimes it cannot.  Consider an example
 where data is compressed and the original 4K page has been compressed
 to 1K.  Now an attempt is made to overwrite the page with data that
 is non-compressible and so would take the entire 4K.  But the backend
 has no more space.  In this case, the store must be rejected.  Whenever
 frontswap rejects a store that would overwrite, it also must invalidate
 the old data and ensure that it is no longer accessible.  Since the
 swap subsystem then writes the new data to the read swap device,
 this is the correct course of action to ensure coherency.
 
 * Why does the frontswap patch create the new include file swapfile.h?
 
 The frontswap code depends on some swap-subsystem-internal data
 structures that have, over the years, moved back and forth between
 static and global.  This seemed a reasonable compromise:  Define
 them as global but declare them in a new include file that isn't
 included by the large number of source files that include swap.h.
 
 Dan Magenheimer, last updated April 9, 2012

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