Re: [PATCH] zsmalloc: do not use bit_spin_lock

[Shakeel Butt <shakeelb@google.com>]

On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 12:06 PM Song Bao Hua (Barry Song)
<song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Shakeel Butt [mailto:shakeelb@google.com]
> > Sent: Tuesday, December 22, 2020 8:50 AM
> > To: Vitaly Wool <vitaly.wool@konsulko.com>
> > Cc: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>; Mike Galbraith <efault@gmx.de>; LKML
> > <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>; linux-mm <linux-mm@kvack.org>; Song Bao Hua
> > (Barry Song) <song.bao.hua@hisilicon.com>; Sebastian Andrzej Siewior
> > <bigeasy@linutronix.de>; NitinGupta <ngupta@vflare.org>; Sergey Senozhatsky
> > <sergey.senozhatsky.work@gmail.com>; Andrew Morton
> > <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
> > Subject: Re: [PATCH] zsmalloc: do not use bit_spin_lock
> >
> > On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 11:20 AM Vitaly Wool <vitaly.wool@konsulko.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Mon, Dec 21, 2020 at 6:24 PM Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> wrote:
> > > >
> > > > On Sun, Dec 20, 2020 at 02:22:28AM +0200, Vitaly Wool wrote:
> > > > > zsmalloc takes bit spinlock in its _map() callback and releases it
> > > > > only in unmap() which is unsafe and leads to zswap complaining
> > > > > about scheduling in atomic context.
> > > > >
> > > > > To fix that and to improve RT properties of zsmalloc, remove that
> > > > > bit spinlock completely and use a bit flag instead.
> > > >
> > > > I don't want to use such open code for the lock.
> > > >
> > > > I see from Mike's patch, recent zswap change introduced the lockdep
> > > > splat bug and you want to improve zsmalloc to fix the zswap bug and
> > > > introduce this patch with allowing preemption enabling.
> > >
> > > This understanding is upside down. The code in zswap you are referring
> > > to is not buggy.  You may claim that it is suboptimal but there is
> > > nothing wrong in taking a mutex.
> > >
> >
> > Is this suboptimal for all or just the hardware accelerators? Sorry, I
> > am not very familiar with the crypto API. If I select lzo or lz4 as a
> > zswap compressor will the [de]compression be async or sync?
>
> Right now, in crypto subsystem, new drivers are required to write based on
> async APIs. The old sync API can't work in new accelerator drivers as they
> are not supported at all.
>
> Old drivers are used to sync, but they've got async wrappers to support async
> APIs. Eg.
> crypto: acomp - add support for lz4 via scomp
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/crypto/lz4.c?id=8cd9330e0a615c931037d4def98b5ce0d540f08d
>
> crypto: acomp - add support for lzo via scomp
> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/crypto/lzo.c?id=ac9d2c4b39e022d2c61486bfc33b730cfd02898e
>
> so they are supporting async APIs but they are still working in sync mode as
> those old drivers don't sleep.
>

Good to know that those are sync because I want them to be sync.
Please note that zswap is a cache in front of a real swap and the load
operation is latency sensitive as it comes in the page fault path and
directly impacts the applications. I doubt decompressing synchronously
a 4k page on a cpu will be costlier than asynchronously decompressing
the same page from hardware accelerators.