On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 03:41:41PM -0800, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Tue, 27 Nov 2018 14:54:29 +0900 Minchan Kim <minc...@kernel.org> wrote:
>
> > On small memory system, there are lots of write IO so if we use
> > flash device as swap, there would be serious flash wearout.
> > To overcome the problem, system developers need to design write
> > limitation strategy to guarantee flash health for entire product life.
> >
> > This patch creates a new konb "writeback_limit" on zram. With that,
> > if current writeback IO count(/sys/block/zramX/io_stat) excceds
bd_stat
> > the limitation, zram stops further writeback until admin can reset
> > the limit.
>
> I'm not really understanding this. Does this only refer to suspending
> the idle page writeback feature? Not all zram writeback, surely?
It aims for all zram writeback.
>
> I don't think the documentation gives an administrator sufficient
> information to effectively use the feature. Some additional discussion
> would help. What sort of values should it be set to and why?
>
> And what is the default setting? And why?
Default setting is 0 so there is no limitation because we couldn't
expect user's workload of zram.
>
> And the limit isn't persistent across reboots which makes me wonder
> whether the overall feature is particularly valuable?
Good point.
Keeping the value in persisten across reboot is userspace's role.
I will add this for admin
"
You could know how many of write happens since the system boot
via /sys/block/zramX/bd_stat's bd_writes.
If your backing device has wearout concern, you could limit the
writing via /sys/block/zramX/writeback_limit.
For instance, if the vaule you read bd_writes is 200, you could
set 300 to writeback_limit so upcomding 100 write be only allowed.
If you set the writeback_limit to lower value than current
bd_writes's value, zram allow further writeback without limit.
The value will reset when your system reboot so keeping how many
write happn until now across reboot is user's job.
"
