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authorMinchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org>2014-01-30 15:45:52 -0800
committerSimon Shields <keepcalm444@gmail.com>2016-06-12 21:19:52 +1000
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zram: promote zram from staging
Zram has lived in staging for a LONG LONG time and have been fixed/improved by many contributors so code is clean and stable now. Of course, there are lots of product using zram in real practice. The major TV companys have used zram as swap since two years ago and recently our production team released android smart phone with zram which is used as swap, too and recently Android Kitkat start to use zram for small memory smart phone. And there was a report Google released their ChromeOS with zram, too and cyanogenmod have been used zram long time ago. And I heard some disto have used zram block device for tmpfs. In addition, I saw many report from many other peoples. For example, Lubuntu start to use it. The benefit of zram is very clear. With my experience, one of the benefit was to remove jitter of video application with backgroud memory pressure. It would be effect of efficient memory usage by compression but more issue is whether swap is there or not in the system. Recent mobile platforms have used JAVA so there are many anonymous pages. But embedded system normally are reluctant to use eMMC or SDCard as swap because there is wear-leveling and latency issues so if we do not use swap, it means we can't reclaim anoymous pages and at last, we could encounter OOM kill. :( Although we have real storage as swap, it was a problem, too. Because it sometime ends up making system very unresponsible caused by slow swap storage performance. Quote from Luigi on Google "Since Chrome OS was mentioned: the main reason why we don't use swap to a disk (rotating or SSD) is because it doesn't degrade gracefully and leads to a bad interactive experience. Generally we prefer to manage RAM at a higher level, by transparently killing and restarting processes. But we noticed that zram is fast enough to be competitive with the latter, and it lets us make more efficient use of the available RAM. " and he announced. http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-mm/msg57717.html Other uses case is to use zram for block device. Zram is block device so anyone can format the block device and mount on it so some guys on the internet start zram as /var/tmp. http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-838198-start-0.html Let's promote zram and enhance/maintain it instead of removing. Change-Id: Ie8f4e47eb9b74f4269da921eb6c709964fb6753e Signed-off-by: Minchan Kim <minchan@kernel.org> Reviewed-by: Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com> Acked-by: Nitin Gupta <ngupta@vflare.org> Acked-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@kernel.org> Cc: Bob Liu <bob.liu@oracle.com> Cc: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com> Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> Cc: Luigi Semenzato <semenzato@google.com> Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de> Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com> Cc: Seth Jennings <sjenning@linux.vnet.ibm.com> Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org> Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> Conflicts: drivers/block/Kconfig drivers/staging/Kconfig drivers/staging/Makefile
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+zram: Compressed RAM based block devices
+----------------------------------------
+
+Project home: http://compcache.googlecode.com/
+
+* Introduction
+
+The zram module creates RAM based block devices named /dev/zram<id>
+(<id> = 0, 1, ...). Pages written to these disks are compressed and stored
+in memory itself. These disks allow very fast I/O and compression provides
+good amounts of memory savings. Some of the usecases include /tmp storage,
+use as swap disks, various caches under /var and maybe many more :)
+
+Statistics for individual zram devices are exported through sysfs nodes at
+/sys/block/zram<id>/
+
+* Usage
+
+Following shows a typical sequence of steps for using zram.
+
+1) Load Module:
+ modprobe zram num_devices=4
+ This creates 4 devices: /dev/zram{0,1,2,3}
+ (num_devices parameter is optional. Default: 1)
+
+2) Set Disksize
+ Set disk size by writing the value to sysfs node 'disksize'.
+ The value can be either in bytes or you can use mem suffixes.
+ Examples:
+ # Initialize /dev/zram0 with 50MB disksize
+ echo $((50*1024*1024)) > /sys/block/zram0/disksize
+
+ # Using mem suffixes
+ echo 256K > /sys/block/zram0/disksize
+ echo 512M > /sys/block/zram0/disksize
+ echo 1G > /sys/block/zram0/disksize
+
+3) Activate:
+ mkswap /dev/zram0
+ swapon /dev/zram0
+
+ mkfs.ext4 /dev/zram1
+ mount /dev/zram1 /tmp
+
+4) Stats:
+ Per-device statistics are exported as various nodes under
+ /sys/block/zram<id>/
+ disksize
+ num_reads
+ num_writes
+ invalid_io
+ notify_free
+ discard
+ zero_pages
+ orig_data_size
+ compr_data_size
+ mem_used_total
+
+5) Deactivate:
+ swapoff /dev/zram0
+ umount /dev/zram1
+
+6) Reset:
+ Write any positive value to 'reset' sysfs node
+ echo 1 > /sys/block/zram0/reset
+ echo 1 > /sys/block/zram1/reset
+
+ This frees all the memory allocated for the given device and
+ resets the disksize to zero. You must set the disksize again
+ before reusing the device.
+
+Please report any problems at:
+ - Mailing list: linux-mm-cc at laptop dot org
+ - Issue tracker: http://code.google.com/p/compcache/issues/list
+
+Nitin Gupta
+ngupta@vflare.org