zsmalloc: zsmalloc documentation

Create zsmalloc doc which explains design concept and stat information.

Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>
Cc: Juneho Choi <juno.choi@lge.com>
Cc: Gunho Lee <gunho.lee@lge.com>
Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com>
Cc: Dan Streetman <ddstreet@ieee.org>
Cc: Seth Jennings <sjennings@variantweb.net>
Cc: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org>
Cc: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Cc: Sergey Senozhatsky <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
Cc: Joonsoo Kim <iamjoonsoo.kim@lge.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 70 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt b/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
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index 000000000000..64ed63c4f69d
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+++ b/Documentation/vm/zsmalloc.txt
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+zsmalloc
+--------
+
+This allocator is designed for use with zram. Thus, the allocator is
+supposed to work well under low memory conditions. In particular, it
+never attempts higher order page allocation which is very likely to
+fail under memory pressure. On the other hand, if we just use single
+(0-order) pages, it would suffer from very high fragmentation --
+any object of size PAGE_SIZE/2 or larger would occupy an entire page.
+This was one of the major issues with its predecessor (xvmalloc).
+
+To overcome these issues, zsmalloc allocates a bunch of 0-order pages
+and links them together using various 'struct page' fields. These linked
+pages act as a single higher-order page i.e. an object can span 0-order
+page boundaries. The code refers to these linked pages as a single entity
+called zspage.
+
+For simplicity, zsmalloc can only allocate objects of size up to PAGE_SIZE
+since this satisfies the requirements of all its current users (in the
+worst case, page is incompressible and is thus stored "as-is" i.e. in
+uncompressed form). For allocation requests larger than this size, failure
+is returned (see zs_malloc).
+
+Additionally, zs_malloc() does not return a dereferenceable pointer.
+Instead, it returns an opaque handle (unsigned long) which encodes actual
+location of the allocated object. The reason for this indirection is that
+zsmalloc does not keep zspages permanently mapped since that would cause
+issues on 32-bit systems where the VA region for kernel space mappings
+is very small. So, before using the allocating memory, the object has to
+be mapped using zs_map_object() to get a usable pointer and subsequently
+unmapped using zs_unmap_object().
+
+stat
+----
+
+With CONFIG_ZSMALLOC_STAT, we could see zsmalloc internal information via
+/sys/kernel/debug/zsmalloc/<user name>. Here is a sample of stat output:
+
+# cat /sys/kernel/debug/zsmalloc/zram0/classes
+
+ class  size almost_full almost_empty obj_allocated   obj_used pages_used pages_per_zspage
+    ..
+    ..
+     9   176           0            1           186        129          8                4
+    10   192           1            0          2880       2872        135                3
+    11   208           0            1           819        795         42                2
+    12   224           0            1           219        159         12                4
+    ..
+    ..
+
+
+class: index
+size: object size zspage stores
+almost_empty: the number of ZS_ALMOST_EMPTY zspages(see below)
+almost_full: the number of ZS_ALMOST_FULL zspages(see below)
+obj_allocated: the number of objects allocated
+obj_used: the number of objects allocated to the user
+pages_used: the number of pages allocated for the class
+pages_per_zspage: the number of 0-order pages to make a zspage
+
+We assign a zspage to ZS_ALMOST_EMPTY fullness group when:
+      n <= N / f, where
+n = number of allocated objects
+N = total number of objects zspage can store
+f = fullness_threshold_frac(ie, 4 at the moment)
+
+Similarly, we assign zspage to:
+      ZS_ALMOST_FULL  when n > N / f
+      ZS_EMPTY        when n == 0
+      ZS_FULL         when n == N