Documentation / vm / cleancache.txt

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Based on kernel version 3.4. Page generated on 2012-05-21 22:13 EST.

	MOTIVATION
	
	Cleancache is a new optional feature provided by the VFS layer that
	potentially dramatically increases page cache effectiveness for
	many workloads in many environments at a negligible cost.
	
	Cleancache can be thought of as a page-granularity victim cache for clean
	pages that the kernel's pageframe replacement algorithm (PFRA) would like
	to keep around, but can't since there isn't enough memory.  So when the
	PFRA "evicts" a page, it first attempts to use cleancache code to
	put the data contained in that page into "transcendent memory", memory
	that is not directly accessible or addressable by the kernel and is
	of unknown and possibly time-varying size.
	
	Later, when a cleancache-enabled filesystem wishes to access a page
	in a file on disk, it first checks cleancache to see if it already
	contains it; if it does, the page of data is copied into the kernel
	and a disk access is avoided.
	
	Transcendent memory "drivers" for cleancache are currently implemented
	in Xen (using hypervisor memory) and zcache (using in-kernel compressed
	memory) and other implementations are in development.
	
	FAQs are included below.
	
	IMPLEMENTATION OVERVIEW
	
	A cleancache "backend" that provides transcendent memory registers itself
	to the kernel's cleancache "frontend" by calling cleancache_register_ops,
	passing a pointer to a cleancache_ops structure with funcs set appropriately.
	Note that cleancache_register_ops returns the previous settings so that
	chaining can be performed if desired. The functions provided must conform to
	certain semantics as follows:
	
	Most important, cleancache is "ephemeral".  Pages which are copied into
	cleancache have an indefinite lifetime which is completely unknowable
	by the kernel and so may or may not still be in cleancache at any later time.
	Thus, as its name implies, cleancache is not suitable for dirty pages.
	Cleancache has complete discretion over what pages to preserve and what
	pages to discard and when.
	
	Mounting a cleancache-enabled filesystem should call "init_fs" to obtain a
	pool id which, if positive, must be saved in the filesystem's superblock;
	a negative return value indicates failure.  A "put_page" will copy a
	(presumably about-to-be-evicted) page into cleancache and associate it with
	the pool id, a file key, and a page index into the file.  (The combination
	of a pool id, a file key, and an index is sometimes called a "handle".)
	A "get_page" will copy the page, if found, from cleancache into kernel memory.
	An "invalidate_page" will ensure the page no longer is present in cleancache;
	an "invalidate_inode" will invalidate all pages associated with the specified
	file; and, when a filesystem is unmounted, an "invalidate_fs" will invalidate
	all pages in all files specified by the given pool id and also surrender
	the pool id.
	
	An "init_shared_fs", like init_fs, obtains a pool id but tells cleancache
	to treat the pool as shared using a 128-bit UUID as a key.  On systems
	that may run multiple kernels (such as hard partitioned or virtualized
	systems) that may share a clustered filesystem, and where cleancache
	may be shared among those kernels, calls to init_shared_fs that specify the
	same UUID will receive the same pool id, thus allowing the pages to
	be shared.  Note that any security requirements must be imposed outside
	of the kernel (e.g. by "tools" that control cleancache).  Or a
	cleancache implementation can simply disable shared_init by always
	returning a negative value.
	
	If a get_page is successful on a non-shared pool, the page is invalidated
	(thus making cleancache an "exclusive" cache).  On a shared pool, the page
	is NOT invalidated on a successful get_page so that it remains accessible to
	other sharers.  The kernel is responsible for ensuring coherency between
	cleancache (shared or not), the page cache, and the filesystem, using
	cleancache invalidate operations as required.
	
	Note that cleancache must enforce put-put-get coherency and get-get
	coherency.  For the former, if two puts are made to the same handle but
	with different data, say AAA by the first put and BBB by the second, a
	subsequent get can never return the stale data (AAA).  For get-get coherency,
	if a get for a given handle fails, subsequent gets for that handle will
	never succeed unless preceded by a successful put with that handle.
	
	Last, cleancache provides no SMP serialization guarantees; if two
	different Linux threads are simultaneously putting and invalidating a page
	with the same handle, the results are indeterminate.  Callers must
	lock the page to ensure serial behavior.
	
	CLEANCACHE PERFORMANCE METRICS
	
	If properly configured, monitoring of cleancache is done via debugfs in
	the /sys/kernel/debug/mm/cleancache directory.  The effectiveness of cleancache
	can be measured (across all filesystems) with:
	
	succ_gets	- number of gets that were successful
	failed_gets	- number of gets that failed
	puts		- number of puts attempted (all "succeed")
	invalidates	- number of invalidates attempted
	
	A backend implementation may provide additional metrics.
	
	FAQ
	
	1) Where's the value? (Andrew Morton)
	
	Cleancache provides a significant performance benefit to many workloads
	in many environments with negligible overhead by improving the
	effectiveness of the pagecache.  Clean pagecache pages are
	saved in transcendent memory (RAM that is otherwise not directly
	addressable to the kernel); fetching those pages later avoids "refaults"
	and thus disk reads.
	
	Cleancache (and its sister code "frontswap") provide interfaces for
	this transcendent memory (aka "tmem"), which conceptually lies between
	fast kernel-directly-addressable RAM and slower DMA/asynchronous devices.
	Disallowing direct kernel or userland reads/writes to tmem
	is ideal when data is transformed to a different form and size (such
	as with compression) or secretly moved (as might be useful for write-
	balancing for some RAM-like devices).  Evicted page-cache pages (and
	swap pages) are a great use for this kind of slower-than-RAM-but-much-
	faster-than-disk transcendent memory, and the cleancache (and frontswap)
	"page-object-oriented" specification provides a nice way to read and
	write -- and indirectly "name" -- the pages.
	
	In the virtual case, the whole point of virtualization is to statistically
	multiplex physical resources across the varying demands of multiple
	virtual machines.  This is really hard to do with RAM and efforts to
	do it well with no kernel change have essentially failed (except in some
	well-publicized special-case workloads).  Cleancache -- and frontswap --
	with a fairly small impact on the kernel, provide a huge amount
	of flexibility for more dynamic, flexible RAM multiplexing.
	Specifically, the Xen Transcendent Memory backend allows otherwise
	"fallow" hypervisor-owned RAM to not only be "time-shared" between multiple
	virtual machines, but the pages can be compressed and deduplicated to
	optimize RAM utilization.  And when guest OS's are induced to surrender
	underutilized RAM (e.g. with "self-ballooning"), page cache pages
	are the first to go, and cleancache allows those pages to be
	saved and reclaimed if overall host system memory conditions allow.
	
	And the identical interface used for cleancache can be used in
	physical systems as well.  The zcache driver acts as a memory-hungry
	device that stores pages of data in a compressed state.  And
	the proposed "RAMster" driver shares RAM across multiple physical
	systems.
	
	2) Why does cleancache have its sticky fingers so deep inside the
	   filesystems and VFS? (Andrew Morton and Christoph Hellwig)
	
	The core hooks for cleancache in VFS are in most cases a single line
	and the minimum set are placed precisely where needed to maintain
	coherency (via cleancache_invalidate operations) between cleancache,
	the page cache, and disk.  All hooks compile into nothingness if
	cleancache is config'ed off and turn into a function-pointer-
	compare-to-NULL if config'ed on but no backend claims the ops
	functions, or to a compare-struct-element-to-negative if a
	backend claims the ops functions but a filesystem doesn't enable
	cleancache.
	
	Some filesystems are built entirely on top of VFS and the hooks
	in VFS are sufficient, so don't require an "init_fs" hook; the
	initial implementation of cleancache didn't provide this hook.
	But for some filesystems (such as btrfs), the VFS hooks are
	incomplete and one or more hooks in fs-specific code are required.
	And for some other filesystems, such as tmpfs, cleancache may
	be counterproductive.  So it seemed prudent to require a filesystem
	to "opt in" to use cleancache, which requires adding a hook in
	each filesystem.  Not all filesystems are supported by cleancache
	only because they haven't been tested.  The existing set should
	be sufficient to validate the concept, the opt-in approach means
	that untested filesystems are not affected, and the hooks in the
	existing filesystems should make it very easy to add more
	filesystems in the future.
	
	The total impact of the hooks to existing fs and mm files is only
	about 40 lines added (not counting comments and blank lines).
	
	3) Why not make cleancache asynchronous and batched so it can
	   more easily interface with real devices with DMA instead
	   of copying each individual page? (Minchan Kim)
	
	The one-page-at-a-time copy semantics simplifies the implementation
	on both the frontend and backend and also allows the backend to
	do fancy things on-the-fly like page compression and
	page deduplication.  And since the data is "gone" (copied into/out
	of the pageframe) before the cleancache get/put call returns,
	a great deal of race conditions and potential coherency issues
	are avoided.  While the interface seems odd for a "real device"
	or for real kernel-addressable RAM, it makes perfect sense for
	transcendent memory.
	
	4) Why is non-shared cleancache "exclusive"?  And where is the
	   page "invalidated" after a "get"? (Minchan Kim)
	
	The main reason is to free up space in transcendent memory and
	to avoid unnecessary cleancache_invalidate calls.  If you want inclusive,
	the page can be "put" immediately following the "get".  If
	put-after-get for inclusive becomes common, the interface could
	be easily extended to add a "get_no_invalidate" call.
	
	The invalidate is done by the cleancache backend implementation.
	
	5) What's the performance impact?
	
	Performance analysis has been presented at OLS'09 and LCA'10.
	Briefly, performance gains can be significant on most workloads,
	especially when memory pressure is high (e.g. when RAM is
	overcommitted in a virtual workload); and because the hooks are
	invoked primarily in place of or in addition to a disk read/write,
	overhead is negligible even in worst case workloads.  Basically
	cleancache replaces I/O with memory-copy-CPU-overhead; on older
	single-core systems with slow memory-copy speeds, cleancache
	has little value, but in newer multicore machines, especially
	consolidated/virtualized machines, it has great value.
	
	6) How do I add cleancache support for filesystem X? (Boaz Harrash)
	
	Filesystems that are well-behaved and conform to certain
	restrictions can utilize cleancache simply by making a call to
	cleancache_init_fs at mount time.  Unusual, misbehaving, or
	poorly layered filesystems must either add additional hooks
	and/or undergo extensive additional testing... or should just
	not enable the optional cleancache.
	
	Some points for a filesystem to consider:
	
	- The FS should be block-device-based (e.g. a ram-based FS such
	  as tmpfs should not enable cleancache)
	- To ensure coherency/correctness, the FS must ensure that all
	  file removal or truncation operations either go through VFS or
	  add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache "invalidate" operations
	- To ensure coherency/correctness, either inode numbers must
	  be unique across the lifetime of the on-disk file OR the
	  FS must provide an "encode_fh" function.
	- The FS must call the VFS superblock alloc and deactivate routines
	  or add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache calls done there.
	- To maximize performance, all pages fetched from the FS should
	  go through the do_mpag_readpage routine or the FS should add
	  hooks to do the equivalent (cf. btrfs)
	- Currently, the FS blocksize must be the same as PAGESIZE.  This
	  is not an architectural restriction, but no backends currently
	  support anything different.
	- A clustered FS should invoke the "shared_init_fs" cleancache
	  hook to get best performance for some backends.
	
	7) Why not use the KVA of the inode as the key? (Christoph Hellwig)
	
	If cleancache would use the inode virtual address instead of
	inode/filehandle, the pool id could be eliminated.  But, this
	won't work because cleancache retains pagecache data pages
	persistently even when the inode has been pruned from the
	inode unused list, and only invalidates the data page if the file
	gets removed/truncated.  So if cleancache used the inode kva,
	there would be potential coherency issues if/when the inode
	kva is reused for a different file.  Alternately, if cleancache
	invalidated the pages when the inode kva was freed, much of the value
	of cleancache would be lost because the cache of pages in cleanache
	is potentially much larger than the kernel pagecache and is most
	useful if the pages survive inode cache removal.
	
	8) Why is a global variable required?
	
	The cleancache_enabled flag is checked in all of the frequently-used
	cleancache hooks.  The alternative is a function call to check a static
	variable. Since cleancache is enabled dynamically at runtime, systems
	that don't enable cleancache would suffer thousands (possibly
	tens-of-thousands) of unnecessary function calls per second.  So the
	global variable allows cleancache to be enabled by default at compile
	time, but have insignificant performance impact when cleancache remains
	disabled at runtime.
	
	9) Does cleanache work with KVM?
	
	The memory model of KVM is sufficiently different that a cleancache
	backend may have less value for KVM.  This remains to be tested,
	especially in an overcommitted system.
	
	10) Does cleancache work in userspace?  It sounds useful for
	   memory hungry caches like web browsers.  (Jamie Lokier)
	
	No plans yet, though we agree it sounds useful, at least for
	apps that bypass the page cache (e.g. O_DIRECT).
	
	Last updated: Dan Magenheimer, April 13 2011

• [ vm ]
• 00-INDEX
• active_mm.txt
• balance
• cleancache.txt
• highmem.txt
• hugetlbpage.txt
• hwpoison.txt
• ksm.txt
• locking
• numa
• numa_memory_policy.txt
• overcommit-accounting
• page_migration
• pagemap.txt
• slub.txt
• transhuge.txt
• unevictable-lru.txt
•