Uncached Buffered I/O & Some Other Nice Memory Management Optimizations With Linux 6.14

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 24 January 2025 at 08:28 PM EST. 8 Comments
LINUX KERNEL
Andrew Morton made for an exciting Friday evening by sending out his "MM" pull request for Linux 6.14 as the large collection of memory management related patches for this next kernel version.

There is a ton of exciting MM changes this cycle for the Linux 6.14 kernel release due out in March. Some of the most exciting changes I found from this Linux 6.14 MM pull include:

- The Uncached buffered I/O support from Jens Axboe is included! With the new RWF_DONTCACHE flag, this uncached buffered I/O support is a nice performance win.

- A rework of the swap allocator locks that also simplifies swap allocator locking was found to provide a 400% speedup for one workload while a 35% reduction for kernel build times when using swap on zRAM. The 400% win was in a VM scalability test with pmem as SWAP. Details within this patch series.

- Google's Yu Zhao contributed a few MGLRU fixes as well as some new MGLRU performance optimizations to that important code.

- Support for large folios with TMPFS rather than being only limited to PMD-sized folios.

- Removing the global swap cgroup lock was found to provide a 10% speed-up for TMPFS-based kernel builds.

- Improved memory accounting accuracy by accounting for page tables at all levels.

- Various DAMON improvements like page level properties based monitoring.

See this pull request for the full list of MM feature changes submitted for Linux 6.14.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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