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.

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>

1 files changed, 77 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt b/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..765d790ae831
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/blockdev/zram.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,77 @@
+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