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>

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/fs.h b/include/linux/fs.h
index 9d77309da153..38356ab827c9 100644
--- a/include/linux/fs.h
+++ b/include/linux/fs.h
@@ -638,6 +638,10 @@ struct address_space_operations {
         int (*is_partially_uptodate) (struct page *, read_descriptor_t *,
                                         unsigned long);
         int (*error_remove_page)(struct address_space *, struct page *);
+
+        /* swapfile support */
+        int (*swap_activate)(struct file *file);
+        int (*swap_deactivate)(struct file *file);
 };
 
 extern const struct address_space_operations empty_aops;