linux/include
Mel Gorman 62c230bc17 mm: add support for a filesystem to activate swap files and use direct_IO for writing swap pages
Currently swapfiles are managed entirely by the core VM by using ->bmap to
allocate space and write to the blocks directly.  This effectively ensures
that the underlying blocks are allocated and avoids the need for the swap
subsystem to locate what physical blocks store offsets within a file.

If the swap subsystem is to use the filesystem information to locate the
blocks, it is critical that information such as block groups, block
bitmaps and the block descriptor table that map the swap file were
resident in memory.  This patch adds address_space_operations that the VM
can call when activating or deactivating swap backed by a file.

  int swap_activate(struct file *);
  int swap_deactivate(struct file *);

The ->swap_activate() method is used to communicate to the file that the
VM relies on it, and the address_space should take adequate measures such
as reserving space in the underlying device, reserving memory for mempools
and pinning information such as the block descriptor table in memory.  The
->swap_deactivate() method is called on sys_swapoff() if ->swap_activate()
returned success.

After a successful swapfile ->swap_activate, the swapfile is marked
SWP_FILE and swapper_space.a_ops will proxy to
sis->swap_file->f_mappings->a_ops using ->direct_io to write swapcache
pages and ->readpage to read.

It is perfectly possible that direct_IO be used to read the swap pages but
it is an unnecessary complication.  Similarly, it is possible that
->writepage be used instead of direct_io to write the pages but filesystem
developers have stated that calling writepage from the VM is undesirable
for a variety of reasons and using direct_IO opens up the possibility of
writing back batches of swap pages in the future.

[a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl: Original patch]
Signed-off-by: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Acked-by: Rik van Riel <riel@redhat.com>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
Cc: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
Cc: Eric B Munson <emunson@mgebm.net>
Cc: Eric Paris <eparis@redhat.com>
Cc: James Morris <jmorris@namei.org>
Cc: Mel Gorman <mgorman@suse.de>
Cc: Mike Christie <michaelc@cs.wisc.edu>
Cc: Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Cc: Sebastian Andrzej Siewior <sebastian@breakpoint.cc>
Cc: Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
Cc: Xiaotian Feng <dfeng@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
2012-07-31 18:42:47 -07:00
..
acpi Merge branch 'release' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/lenb/linux 2012-07-26 14:28:55 -07:00
asm-generic Merge branch 'akpm' (Andrew's patch-bomb) 2012-07-30 17:25:34 -07:00
crypto
drm drm/exynos: add property for plane zpos 2012-07-27 11:13:54 +09:00
keys
linux mm: add support for a filesystem to activate swap files and use direct_IO for writing swap pages 2012-07-31 18:42:47 -07:00
math-emu
media [media] media: gpio-ir-recv: add allowed_protos for platform data 2012-07-06 18:21:53 -03:00
memory
misc
mtd
net netvm: prevent a stream-specific deadlock 2012-07-31 18:42:47 -07:00
pcmcia
ras
rdma Merge branches 'cma', 'cxgb4', 'misc', 'mlx4-sriov', 'mlx-cleanups', 'ocrdma' and 'qib' into for-linus 2012-07-22 23:26:17 -07:00
rxrpc
scsi Merge branch 'master' [vanilla Linus master] into libata-dev.git/upstream 2012-07-25 15:58:48 -04:00
sound Merge branch 'topic/pm-convert' into for-next 2012-07-19 08:21:57 +02:00
target target: Allow for target_submit_cmd() returning errors 2012-07-17 17:05:05 -07:00
trace mm: introduce __GFP_MEMALLOC to allow access to emergency reserves 2012-07-31 18:42:45 -07:00
video
xen xen PVonHVM: move shared_info to MMIO before kexec 2012-07-19 15:52:05 -04:00
Kbuild