Based on kernel version 4.16.1. Page generated on 2018-04-09 11:53 EST.
1 MOTIVATION 2 3 Cleancache is a new optional feature provided by the VFS layer that 4 potentially dramatically increases page cache effectiveness for 5 many workloads in many environments at a negligible cost. 6 7 Cleancache can be thought of as a page-granularity victim cache for clean 8 pages that the kernel's pageframe replacement algorithm (PFRA) would like 9 to keep around, but can't since there isn't enough memory. So when the 10 PFRA "evicts" a page, it first attempts to use cleancache code to 11 put the data contained in that page into "transcendent memory", memory 12 that is not directly accessible or addressable by the kernel and is 13 of unknown and possibly time-varying size. 14 15 Later, when a cleancache-enabled filesystem wishes to access a page 16 in a file on disk, it first checks cleancache to see if it already 17 contains it; if it does, the page of data is copied into the kernel 18 and a disk access is avoided. 19 20 Transcendent memory "drivers" for cleancache are currently implemented 21 in Xen (using hypervisor memory) and zcache (using in-kernel compressed 22 memory) and other implementations are in development. 23 24 FAQs are included below. 25 26 IMPLEMENTATION OVERVIEW 27 28 A cleancache "backend" that provides transcendent memory registers itself 29 to the kernel's cleancache "frontend" by calling cleancache_register_ops, 30 passing a pointer to a cleancache_ops structure with funcs set appropriately. 31 The functions provided must conform to certain semantics as follows: 32 33 Most important, cleancache is "ephemeral". Pages which are copied into 34 cleancache have an indefinite lifetime which is completely unknowable 35 by the kernel and so may or may not still be in cleancache at any later time. 36 Thus, as its name implies, cleancache is not suitable for dirty pages. 37 Cleancache has complete discretion over what pages to preserve and what 38 pages to discard and when. 39 40 Mounting a cleancache-enabled filesystem should call "init_fs" to obtain a 41 pool id which, if positive, must be saved in the filesystem's superblock; 42 a negative return value indicates failure. A "put_page" will copy a 43 (presumably about-to-be-evicted) page into cleancache and associate it with 44 the pool id, a file key, and a page index into the file. (The combination 45 of a pool id, a file key, and an index is sometimes called a "handle".) 46 A "get_page" will copy the page, if found, from cleancache into kernel memory. 47 An "invalidate_page" will ensure the page no longer is present in cleancache; 48 an "invalidate_inode" will invalidate all pages associated with the specified 49 file; and, when a filesystem is unmounted, an "invalidate_fs" will invalidate 50 all pages in all files specified by the given pool id and also surrender 51 the pool id. 52 53 An "init_shared_fs", like init_fs, obtains a pool id but tells cleancache 54 to treat the pool as shared using a 128-bit UUID as a key. On systems 55 that may run multiple kernels (such as hard partitioned or virtualized 56 systems) that may share a clustered filesystem, and where cleancache 57 may be shared among those kernels, calls to init_shared_fs that specify the 58 same UUID will receive the same pool id, thus allowing the pages to 59 be shared. Note that any security requirements must be imposed outside 60 of the kernel (e.g. by "tools" that control cleancache). Or a 61 cleancache implementation can simply disable shared_init by always 62 returning a negative value. 63 64 If a get_page is successful on a non-shared pool, the page is invalidated 65 (thus making cleancache an "exclusive" cache). On a shared pool, the page 66 is NOT invalidated on a successful get_page so that it remains accessible to 67 other sharers. The kernel is responsible for ensuring coherency between 68 cleancache (shared or not), the page cache, and the filesystem, using 69 cleancache invalidate operations as required. 70 71 Note that cleancache must enforce put-put-get coherency and get-get 72 coherency. For the former, if two puts are made to the same handle but 73 with different data, say AAA by the first put and BBB by the second, a 74 subsequent get can never return the stale data (AAA). For get-get coherency, 75 if a get for a given handle fails, subsequent gets for that handle will 76 never succeed unless preceded by a successful put with that handle. 77 78 Last, cleancache provides no SMP serialization guarantees; if two 79 different Linux threads are simultaneously putting and invalidating a page 80 with the same handle, the results are indeterminate. Callers must 81 lock the page to ensure serial behavior. 82 83 CLEANCACHE PERFORMANCE METRICS 84 85 If properly configured, monitoring of cleancache is done via debugfs in 86 the /sys/kernel/debug/cleancache directory. The effectiveness of cleancache 87 can be measured (across all filesystems) with: 88 89 succ_gets - number of gets that were successful 90 failed_gets - number of gets that failed 91 puts - number of puts attempted (all "succeed") 92 invalidates - number of invalidates attempted 93 94 A backend implementation may provide additional metrics. 95 96 FAQ 97 98 1) Where's the value? (Andrew Morton) 99 100 Cleancache provides a significant performance benefit to many workloads 101 in many environments with negligible overhead by improving the 102 effectiveness of the pagecache. Clean pagecache pages are 103 saved in transcendent memory (RAM that is otherwise not directly 104 addressable to the kernel); fetching those pages later avoids "refaults" 105 and thus disk reads. 106 107 Cleancache (and its sister code "frontswap") provide interfaces for 108 this transcendent memory (aka "tmem"), which conceptually lies between 109 fast kernel-directly-addressable RAM and slower DMA/asynchronous devices. 110 Disallowing direct kernel or userland reads/writes to tmem 111 is ideal when data is transformed to a different form and size (such 112 as with compression) or secretly moved (as might be useful for write- 113 balancing for some RAM-like devices). Evicted page-cache pages (and 114 swap pages) are a great use for this kind of slower-than-RAM-but-much- 115 faster-than-disk transcendent memory, and the cleancache (and frontswap) 116 "page-object-oriented" specification provides a nice way to read and 117 write -- and indirectly "name" -- the pages. 118 119 In the virtual case, the whole point of virtualization is to statistically 120 multiplex physical resources across the varying demands of multiple 121 virtual machines. This is really hard to do with RAM and efforts to 122 do it well with no kernel change have essentially failed (except in some 123 well-publicized special-case workloads). Cleancache -- and frontswap -- 124 with a fairly small impact on the kernel, provide a huge amount 125 of flexibility for more dynamic, flexible RAM multiplexing. 126 Specifically, the Xen Transcendent Memory backend allows otherwise 127 "fallow" hypervisor-owned RAM to not only be "time-shared" between multiple 128 virtual machines, but the pages can be compressed and deduplicated to 129 optimize RAM utilization. And when guest OS's are induced to surrender 130 underutilized RAM (e.g. with "self-ballooning"), page cache pages 131 are the first to go, and cleancache allows those pages to be 132 saved and reclaimed if overall host system memory conditions allow. 133 134 And the identical interface used for cleancache can be used in 135 physical systems as well. The zcache driver acts as a memory-hungry 136 device that stores pages of data in a compressed state. And 137 the proposed "RAMster" driver shares RAM across multiple physical 138 systems. 139 140 2) Why does cleancache have its sticky fingers so deep inside the 141 filesystems and VFS? (Andrew Morton and Christoph Hellwig) 142 143 The core hooks for cleancache in VFS are in most cases a single line 144 and the minimum set are placed precisely where needed to maintain 145 coherency (via cleancache_invalidate operations) between cleancache, 146 the page cache, and disk. All hooks compile into nothingness if 147 cleancache is config'ed off and turn into a function-pointer- 148 compare-to-NULL if config'ed on but no backend claims the ops 149 functions, or to a compare-struct-element-to-negative if a 150 backend claims the ops functions but a filesystem doesn't enable 151 cleancache. 152 153 Some filesystems are built entirely on top of VFS and the hooks 154 in VFS are sufficient, so don't require an "init_fs" hook; the 155 initial implementation of cleancache didn't provide this hook. 156 But for some filesystems (such as btrfs), the VFS hooks are 157 incomplete and one or more hooks in fs-specific code are required. 158 And for some other filesystems, such as tmpfs, cleancache may 159 be counterproductive. So it seemed prudent to require a filesystem 160 to "opt in" to use cleancache, which requires adding a hook in 161 each filesystem. Not all filesystems are supported by cleancache 162 only because they haven't been tested. The existing set should 163 be sufficient to validate the concept, the opt-in approach means 164 that untested filesystems are not affected, and the hooks in the 165 existing filesystems should make it very easy to add more 166 filesystems in the future. 167 168 The total impact of the hooks to existing fs and mm files is only 169 about 40 lines added (not counting comments and blank lines). 170 171 3) Why not make cleancache asynchronous and batched so it can 172 more easily interface with real devices with DMA instead 173 of copying each individual page? (Minchan Kim) 174 175 The one-page-at-a-time copy semantics simplifies the implementation 176 on both the frontend and backend and also allows the backend to 177 do fancy things on-the-fly like page compression and 178 page deduplication. And since the data is "gone" (copied into/out 179 of the pageframe) before the cleancache get/put call returns, 180 a great deal of race conditions and potential coherency issues 181 are avoided. While the interface seems odd for a "real device" 182 or for real kernel-addressable RAM, it makes perfect sense for 183 transcendent memory. 184 185 4) Why is non-shared cleancache "exclusive"? And where is the 186 page "invalidated" after a "get"? (Minchan Kim) 187 188 The main reason is to free up space in transcendent memory and 189 to avoid unnecessary cleancache_invalidate calls. If you want inclusive, 190 the page can be "put" immediately following the "get". If 191 put-after-get for inclusive becomes common, the interface could 192 be easily extended to add a "get_no_invalidate" call. 193 194 The invalidate is done by the cleancache backend implementation. 195 196 5) What's the performance impact? 197 198 Performance analysis has been presented at OLS'09 and LCA'10. 199 Briefly, performance gains can be significant on most workloads, 200 especially when memory pressure is high (e.g. when RAM is 201 overcommitted in a virtual workload); and because the hooks are 202 invoked primarily in place of or in addition to a disk read/write, 203 overhead is negligible even in worst case workloads. Basically 204 cleancache replaces I/O with memory-copy-CPU-overhead; on older 205 single-core systems with slow memory-copy speeds, cleancache 206 has little value, but in newer multicore machines, especially 207 consolidated/virtualized machines, it has great value. 208 209 6) How do I add cleancache support for filesystem X? (Boaz Harrash) 210 211 Filesystems that are well-behaved and conform to certain 212 restrictions can utilize cleancache simply by making a call to 213 cleancache_init_fs at mount time. Unusual, misbehaving, or 214 poorly layered filesystems must either add additional hooks 215 and/or undergo extensive additional testing... or should just 216 not enable the optional cleancache. 217 218 Some points for a filesystem to consider: 219 220 - The FS should be block-device-based (e.g. a ram-based FS such 221 as tmpfs should not enable cleancache) 222 - To ensure coherency/correctness, the FS must ensure that all 223 file removal or truncation operations either go through VFS or 224 add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache "invalidate" operations 225 - To ensure coherency/correctness, either inode numbers must 226 be unique across the lifetime of the on-disk file OR the 227 FS must provide an "encode_fh" function. 228 - The FS must call the VFS superblock alloc and deactivate routines 229 or add hooks to do the equivalent cleancache calls done there. 230 - To maximize performance, all pages fetched from the FS should 231 go through the do_mpag_readpage routine or the FS should add 232 hooks to do the equivalent (cf. btrfs) 233 - Currently, the FS blocksize must be the same as PAGESIZE. This 234 is not an architectural restriction, but no backends currently 235 support anything different. 236 - A clustered FS should invoke the "shared_init_fs" cleancache 237 hook to get best performance for some backends. 238 239 7) Why not use the KVA of the inode as the key? (Christoph Hellwig) 240 241 If cleancache would use the inode virtual address instead of 242 inode/filehandle, the pool id could be eliminated. But, this 243 won't work because cleancache retains pagecache data pages 244 persistently even when the inode has been pruned from the 245 inode unused list, and only invalidates the data page if the file 246 gets removed/truncated. So if cleancache used the inode kva, 247 there would be potential coherency issues if/when the inode 248 kva is reused for a different file. Alternately, if cleancache 249 invalidated the pages when the inode kva was freed, much of the value 250 of cleancache would be lost because the cache of pages in cleanache 251 is potentially much larger than the kernel pagecache and is most 252 useful if the pages survive inode cache removal. 253 254 8) Why is a global variable required? 255 256 The cleancache_enabled flag is checked in all of the frequently-used 257 cleancache hooks. The alternative is a function call to check a static 258 variable. Since cleancache is enabled dynamically at runtime, systems 259 that don't enable cleancache would suffer thousands (possibly 260 tens-of-thousands) of unnecessary function calls per second. So the 261 global variable allows cleancache to be enabled by default at compile 262 time, but have insignificant performance impact when cleancache remains 263 disabled at runtime. 264 265 9) Does cleanache work with KVM? 266 267 The memory model of KVM is sufficiently different that a cleancache 268 backend may have less value for KVM. This remains to be tested, 269 especially in an overcommitted system. 270 271 10) Does cleancache work in userspace? It sounds useful for 272 memory hungry caches like web browsers. (Jamie Lokier) 273 274 No plans yet, though we agree it sounds useful, at least for 275 apps that bypass the page cache (e.g. O_DIRECT). 276 277 Last updated: Dan Magenheimer, April 13 2011