Am 30.12.22 um 12:11 schrieb Thomas Hellström:
Hi, Christian, others.
I'm starting to take a look at the TTM shrinker again. We'll probably be
needing it at least for supporting integrated hardware with the xe driver.
So assuming that the last attempt failed because of the need to allocate
shmem pages and lack of writeback at shrink time, I was thinking of the
following approach: (A rough design sketch of the core support for the
last bullet is in patch 1/1. It of course needs polishing if the interface
is at all accepted by the mm people).
Before embarking on this, any feedback or comments would be greatly
appreciated:
*) Avoid TTM swapping when no swap space is available. Better to adjust the
TTM swapout watermark, as no pages can be freed to the system anyway.
*) Complement the TTM swapout watermark with a shrinker.
For cached pages, that may hopefully remove the need for the watermark.
Possibly a watermark needs to remain for wc pages and / or dma pages,
depending on how well shrinking them works.
Yeah, that's what I've already tried and failed miserable exactly
because of what you described above.
*) Trigger immediate writeback of pages handed to the swapcache / shmem,
at least when the shrinker is called from kswapd.
Not sure if that's really valuable.
*) Hide ttm_tt_swap[out|in] details in the ttm_pool code. In the pool code
we have more details about the backing pages and can split pages,
transition caching state and copy as necessary. Also investigate the
possibility of reusing pool pages in a smart way if copying is needed.
Well I think we don't need to split pages at all. The higher order pages
are just allocated for better TLB utilization and could (in theory) be
freed as individual pages as well. It's just that MM doesn't support
that atm.
But I really like the idea of moving more of this logic into the ttm_pool.
*) See if we can directly insert pages into the swap-cache instead of
taking the shmem detour, something along with the attached patch 1 RFC.
Yeah, that strongly looks like we way to go. Maybe in combination with
being able to swap WC/UC pages directly out.
While swapping them in again an extra copy doesn't hurt us, but for the
other way that really sucks.
Thanks,
Christian.
Thanks,
Thomas
