a5061ecec5
An effort was started some time ago to consolidate all internal documentation in the git tree. However, this was just an accumulation of files in various formats without any strucutre or way to browse it, which results in no one even knowing that we have docs here. This converts most of the files to restructuredtext and uses Sphinx to generate an HTML browsable user manual (with a table of content and a first attempt to put things in a global hierarchy). There are almost no changes to the documentation content in this commit (some obviously obsolete things were removed). The plan is to get the toolchain up and running to make these docs easily available, and only then see about improving the content. We can migrate some things off the wiki and website, and rework the table of contents to have some more hierarchy levels because currently it's a bit messy. Change-Id: I924ac9dc6e753887ab56f18a09bdb0a1e1793bfd Reviewed-on: https://review.haiku-os.org/c/haiku/+/4370 Reviewed-by: Niels Sascha Reedijk <niels.reedijk@gmail.com>
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103 lines
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Swap file
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#######################
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This section describes how to use swap file in Haiku and how the swap system
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works.
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How to use a swap file?
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=======================
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Like BeOS, Haiku uses "/var/swap" as default swap file. It is created
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during the boot process and its size is twice the size of physical memory by
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default. You can change its size through the VirtualMemory preference
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application and your settings will take effect after restarting the system.
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The default swap file "/var/swap" may not satisfy your need. Haiku allows
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adding/removing a swap file dynamically. (This is *NOT* implemented yet, since
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I do not know how to add bin commands "swapon" and "swapoff" in the system.
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It needs to be done in the future.)
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How swap system works?
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======================
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The virtual memory subsystem of Haiku is very similar to that of FreeBSD,
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therefore our swap system implementation is borrowed from FreeBSD.
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A swap system has two main functions: (1) maintain a map between anonymous
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pages and swap space, so we can page in/out when needed. (2) manage the
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allocation/deallocation of swap space. Let's see how these are implemented in
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Haiku.
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In order to maintain a map between pages and swap space, we need to record
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the pages' swap address somewhere. Here we use swap blocks. A "swap_block"
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structure contains swap address information for 32 (value of SWAP_BLOCK_PAGES)
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consecutive pages from a same cache. So whenever we look for a page in swap
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files, we should get the swap block for it. But how to get the swap block?
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Here we use hash table. All swap blocks in the system are arranged into a global
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hash table. The hash table uses a cache's address and page index in this cache
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as hash key.
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Here is an example. Suppose a page has been paged out to swap space and now
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its cache wants to page it in. It works as follows: look up the swap hash table
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using address of the cache and page index as hash key, if successful, we get
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the swap block containing the this page's swap address. Then search the swap
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block to get the exact swap address of this page. After that, we can read the
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page from swap file using vfs functions.
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I draw a picture and hope it could help you understand the above words.
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.. code-block:: text
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___________________________________________________________
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sSwapHashTable |__________|___NULL___|___NULL___|___________|____NULL____|
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___V___ ___V___
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swap_block /----|__0__| /--------|__5__|
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| |__3__|--------\ | /---|__6__|
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| |_..._| | | | |_..._|
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| |__2__|----\ | | | |__20_|--------------->
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| | | | |
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| _____________V___V_________V____V_________________________
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swap_file `->|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|slot|....|
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|_0__|_1__|_2__|_3__|_4__|_5__|_6__|_7__|_8__|_9__|____|__
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The swap system also manages allocation/deallocation of swap space. In our
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implementation, each swap file is divided into page-sized slots(called "swap
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pages") and a swap file can be seen as an array of many swap pages(see the
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above picture). Swap page is the unit for swap space allocation/deallocation
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and we use swap page index (slot index) as swap space address instead of offset.
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All the swap pages in the system are given a unified address and we leave one
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page gap between two swap files. (e.g. there are 3 swap files in the system,
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each has 100 swap pages, the address range(to be exact, page index) for each
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swap file is: 0-99, 101-200, 202-301) Why leave a page gap between swap files?
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Because in this way, we can easily tell if two adjacent pages are in a same
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swap file. (See the code in VMAnonymousCache::Read()).
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The efficiency of the FreeBSD swap system lies in a special data structure:
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radix bitmap(i.e. bitmap using radix tree for hinting.) It can operate well no
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matter how much fragmentation there is and no matter how large a bitmap is
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used. I have ported the radix bitmap structure to Haiku, so our swap system
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will have a good performance. More information on radix bitmap, please look
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at the source code.
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Swap space allocation takes place when we swap anonymous pages out.
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In order to make the allocation less probable to fail, anonymous cache will
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reserve swap space when it is initialized. If there is not enough swap space
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left, physical memory will be reserved. Swap space deallocation happens when
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available swap space is low. The page daemon will scan a number of pages and
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if the scanned page has swap space assigned, its swap space will be freed.
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Acknowledgement
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---------------
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Special thanks to my mentor Ingo. He is a knowledged person and always
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gives me encouragement. Without his consistent and illuminating instructions,
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this project would not have reached its present status.
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If you find bugs or have suggestions for swap system, you can contact me
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via upczhsh@163.com. Thanks in advance.
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Zhao Shuai - upczhsh@163.com - 2008-08-21
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