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, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/filesystems/vfs.txt b/Documentation/filesystems/vfs.txt
index aa754e01464..065aa2dc083 100644
--- a/Documentation/filesystems/vfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/filesystems/vfs.txt
@@ -592,6 +592,8 @@ struct address_space_operations {
 	int (*migratepage) (struct page *, struct page *);
 	int (*launder_page) (struct page *);
 	int (*error_remove_page) (struct mapping *mapping, struct page *page);
+	int (*swap_activate)(struct file *);
+	int (*swap_deactivate)(struct file *);
 };
 
   writepage: called by the VM to write a dirty page to backing store.
@@ -760,6 +762,16 @@ struct address_space_operations {
 	Setting this implies you deal with pages going away under you,
 	unless you have them locked or reference counts increased.
 
+  swap_activate: Called when swapon is used on a file to allocate
+	space if necessary and pin the block lookup information in
+	memory. A return value of zero indicates success,
+	in which case this file can be used to back swapspace. The
+	swapspace operations will be proxied to this address space's
+	->swap_{out,in} methods.
+
+  swap_deactivate: Called during swapoff on files where swap_activate
+	was successful.
+
 
 The File Object
 ===============