DAMON-Powered Proactive Reclamation Revised For Linux Memory Savings

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DAMON-Powered Proactive Reclamation Revised For Linux Memory Savings

Amazon's DAMON is looking like it might be near for mainlining into the Linux kernel for this "Data Access Monitor". One of the follow-up patches that builds off DAMON that is also being pursued by Amazon engineers for proactive reclamation of memory pages...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DAMON-Reclaim-v3

[polarathene]

DAMON_RECLAIM on v5.13 Linux kernel with ZRAM swap device and 50ms/s time quota achieves 40.34% memory saving with only 3.38% runtime overhead.

Is that unrelated to the ZRAM compression?

I don't completely follow the linked resource that the quote was from sourced from, I see mention of a 70GiB and 130GiB systems with 4GiB ZRAM swap and workloads such as VMs.

In this case they're running the reclaim for 50ms every second, and paging out the least recently used memory pages to ZRAM swap? So it's swapping out allocated memory that's considered inactive or low priority to free up more memory for allocation in advance? Or is this doing something else? Could be beneficial to desktop/workstation users with 32GB or less RAM?