zRam as swap is useful for small memory device. However, swap means
those pages on zram are mostly cold pages due to VM's LRU algorithm.
Especially, once init data for application are touched for launching,
they tend to be not accessed any more and finally swapped out. zRAM can
store such cold pages as compressed form but it's pointless to keep in
memory. Better idea is app developers free them directly rather than
remaining them on heap.
This patch tell us last access time of each block of zram via "cat
/sys/kernel/debug/zram/zram0/block_state".
The output is as follows,
300 75.033841 .wh
301 63.806904 s..
302 63.806919 ..h
First column is zram's block index and 3rh one represents symbol (s:
same page w: written page to backing store h: huge page) of the block
state. Second column represents usec time unit of the block was last
accessed. So above example means the 300th block is accessed at
75.033851 second and it was huge so it was written to the backing store.
Admin can leverage this information to catch cold|incompressible pages
of process with *pagemap* once part of heaps are swapped out.
I used the feature a few years ago to find memory hoggers in userspace
to notify them what memory they have wasted without touch for a long
time. With it, they could reduce unnecessary memory space. However, at
that time, I hacked up zram for the feature but now I need the feature
again so I decided it would be better to upstream rather than keeping it
alone. I hope I submit the userspace tool to use the feature soon.
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 printk warning]
[minchan@kernel.org: use ktime_get_boottime() instead of sched_clock()]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180420063525.GA253739@rodete-desktop-imager.corp.google.com
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: documentation tweak]
[akpm@linux-foundation.org: fix i386 printk warning]
[minchan@kernel.org: fix compile warning]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180508104849.GA8209@rodete-desktop-imager.corp.google.com
[rdunlap@infradead.org: fix printk formats]
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/3652ccb1-96ef-0b0b-05d1-f661d7733dcc@infradead.org
Link: http://lkml.kernel.org/r/20180416090946.63057-5-minchan@kernel.org
Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Randy Dunlap <rdunlap@infradead.org>
Reviewed-by: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Acked-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
c0265342bf