Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] mm: zsmalloc: make shrinker compaction budget-aware

[Xueyuan Chen <xueyuan.chen21@gmail.com>]

On 2026-10-29 10:48 +0900, Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> On (26/10/29 10:43), Sergey Senozhatsky wrote:
> [..]
> > > Hmm we'd need to collect more data in our workloads to determine, but
> > > if we can compute compactable ratio (freeable_pages / total_pages) on
> > > a per size class basis, can we just skip the size class whose ratio is
> > > too bad? Would that at least cut down on the vast majority of
> > > fruitless memcpys and lock acquisitions etc?
> > > 
> > > I'm always a bit hesitant to over-rely on userspace, especially when
> > > kernel has information to do something smart about it. It might not
> > > react in time, and many proactive reclaiming schemes back off under
> > > heavy memory pressure.
> > 
> > Apologies for the delay.
> > 
> > The thing about shrinker compaction is that it's sort of on the
> > wrong end.  It doesn't trigger compaction when memory is plentiful,
> > no matter the internal fragmentation rate, and start firing compaction
> > scans when memory pressure hits.  The problem with this is that, now
> > compaction moves objects (if can compact zspages) and releases empty
> > zspages, in parallel with potentially heavy swapping out activities,
> > which can simply allocate those released pages back.  Which seems like
> > a useless exercise and needless memcpy-s.  So I was thinking about
> > either putting it under config or just removing it (this might be a
> > harder decision).
> 
> In embedded (android/bookOS/etc.) there is a daemon, that triggers
> various zram activities.  We can wire in pool-compaction (once under
> memory pressure), which is a zram sysfs device attribute, instead
> of pondering zsmalloc with scan callbacks.
> 

What triggering policy do you have in mind for the daemon?

If compaction is still triggered when the system is under memory
pressure, wouldn't it still overlap with heavy swap-out? The shrinker
can already run from kswapd, so moving it to a daemon alone would not
necessarily change that timing.