A new set of 27 patches It brings a “Swap Tables” mechanism to the Linux kernel that aims to improve virtual memory management.
The “Swap Tables” mechanism aims for lower memory usage, higher performance, dynamic swap allocation and growth, greater scalability, and other improvements over the existing swap code that exists within the Linux kernel.
Tencent engineer Kairui Song has released a series of Swap Table patches to implement design ideas discussed in recent months by core developers.
The results are very exciting:
“With this order, the swap subsystem will have a ~20-30% performance gain over basic swap. Idle memory usage is already much lower, average memory consumption remains the same or will be even lower (with further processes). And this will allow for many more future optimizations, with better defined swap operations.”
The code updates also clean up and address various historical issues with the SWAP subsystem.
For those who do not know:
In Linux, swap space (SWAP) acts as a buffer for RAM, storing inactive memory pages on disk to free up RAM for active processes.
Traditional exchange mechanisms have limited flexibility and performance. The proposed “Swap Tables” aim to address these issues by allowing more efficient and dynamic management of the exchange space, potentially leading to better system responsiveness and resource utilization.
George is still wondering what he is doing here….
