From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: from mail-io1-f70.google.com (mail-io1-f70.google.com [209.85.166.70]) by kanga.kvack.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 463DA6B0007 for ; Mon, 5 Nov 2018 11:07:44 -0500 (EST) Received: by mail-io1-f70.google.com with SMTP id w13-v6so10856889iop.2 for ; Mon, 05 Nov 2018 08:07:44 -0800 (PST) Received: from mail-sor-f41.google.com (mail-sor-f41.google.com. [209.85.220.41]) by mx.google.com with SMTPS id l7-v6sor8290540iof.45.2018.11.05.08.07.43 for (Google Transport Security); Mon, 05 Nov 2018 08:07:43 -0800 (PST) Subject: Re: Creating compressed backing_store as swapfile References: <20181105155815.i654i5ctmfpqhggj@angband.pl> From: "Austin S. Hemmelgarn" Message-ID: <79d0c96a-a0a2-63ec-db91-42fd349d50c1@gmail.com> Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2018 11:07:12 -0500 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20181105155815.i654i5ctmfpqhggj@angband.pl> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed Content-Language: en-US Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-linux-mm@kvack.org List-ID: To: Adam Borowski , Pintu Agarwal Cc: linux-mm@kvack.org, open list , kernelnewbies@kernelnewbies.org On 11/5/2018 10:58 AM, Adam Borowski wrote: > On Mon, Nov 05, 2018 at 08:31:46PM +0530, Pintu Agarwal wrote: >> Hi, >> >> I have one requirement: >> I wanted to have a swapfile (64MB to 256MB) on my system. >> But I wanted the data to be compressed and stored on the disk in my swapfile. >> [Similar to zram, but compressed data should be moved to disk, instead of RAM]. >> >> Note: I wanted to optimize RAM space, so performance is not important >> right now for our requirement. >> >> So, what are the options available, to perform this in 4.x kernel version. >> My Kernel: 4.9.x >> Board: any - (arm64 mostly). >> >> As I know, following are the choices: >> 1) ZRAM: But it compresses and store data in RAM itself >> 2) frontswap + zswap : Didn't explore much on this, not sure if this >> is helpful for our case. >> 3) Manually creating swapfile: but how to compress it ? >> 4) Any other options ? > > Loop device on any filesystem that can compress (such as btrfs)? The > performance would suck, though -- besides the indirection of loop, btrfs > compresses in blocks of 128KB while swap wants 4KB writes. Other similar > option is qemu-nbd -- it can use compressed disk images and expose them to a > (local) nbd client. Swap on any type of a networked storage device (NBD, iSCSI, ATAoE, etc) served from the local system is _really_ risky. The moment the local server process for the storage device gets forced out to swap, you deadlock. Performance isn't _too_ bad for the BTRFS case though (I've actually tested this before), just make sure you disable direct I/O mode on the loop device, otherwise you run the risk of data corruption.