[RFC PATCH 0/5] Shared memory for shared extents

[Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@suse.de>]

From: Goldwyn Rodrigues <rgoldwyn@suse.com>

This is an attempt to reduce the memory footprint by using a shared
page(s) for shared extent(s) in the filesystem. I am hoping to start a
discussion to iron out the details for implementation.

Abstract
If mutiple files share an extent, reads from each of the files would
read individual page copies in the inode pagecache mapping, leading to
waste of memory. Instead add the read pages of the filesystem to
underlying device's bd_inode as opposed to file's inode mapping. The
cost is that file offset to device offset conversion happens early in
the read cycle.

Motivation:
 - Reduce memory usage for shared extents
 - Ease DAX implementation for shared extents
 - Reduce Container memory utilization

Implementation
In the read path, pages are read and added to the block_device's
inode's mapping as opposed to the inode's mapping. This is limited
to reads, while write's (and read before writes) still go through
inode's i_mapping. The path does check the inode's i_mapping before
falling back to block device's i_mapping to read pages which may be
dirty. The cost of the operation is file_to_device_offset() translation
on reads. The translation should return a valid value only in case
the file is CoW.

This also means that page->mapping may not point to file's mapping.

Questions:
1. Are there security implications for performing this for read-only
pages? An alternate idea is to add a "struct fspage", which would be
pointed by file's mapping and would point to the block device's page.
Multiple files with shared extents have their own independent fspage
pointing to the same page mapped to block device's mapping.
Any security parameters, if required, would be in this structure. The
advantage of this approach is it would be more flexible with respect to
CoW when the page is dirtied after reads. With the current approach, a
read for write is an independent operation so we can end up with two
copies of the same page. This implementation got complicated too quickly.

2. Should pages be dropped after writebacks (and clone_range) to avoid
duplicate copies?

Limitations:
1. The filesystem have exactly one underlying device.
2. Page size should be equal to filesystem block size

Goldwyn Rodrigues (5):
  mm: Use file parameter to determine bdi
  mm: Switch mapping to device mapping
  btrfs: Add sharedext mount option
  btrfs: Set s_bdev for btrfs super block
  btrfs: function to convert file offset to device offset

 fs/btrfs/ctree.h   |  1 +
 fs/btrfs/file.c    | 42 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 fs/btrfs/super.c   |  7 +++++++
 include/linux/fs.h |  7 ++++++-
 mm/filemap.c       | 34 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++--------
 mm/readahead.c     |  3 +++
 6 files changed, 83 insertions(+), 11 deletions(-)

-- 
2.33.1