The Many Memory Management Improvements In Linux 6.18
([Linux Kernel] 75 Minutes Ago
Linux 6.18 Memory Management)
- Reference: 0001583085
- News link: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-MM
- Source link:
The many memory management "MM" changes were recently merged into the [1]Linux 6.18 kernel, consisting of a number of interesting patch series.
Andrew Morton submitted the big set of MM changes for Linux 6.18. The highlights this cycle from the long list of patches include:
- Improvements to the cluster scan strategy for the swapping code. This improves the large allocation performance. A Tencent engineer found that for a kernel build test with 96 jobs and 10G of zRAM with 64KkB mTHP enabled, the system time was nearly halved and also saw a lower swap failure rate.
- Improvements to the [2]Kexec Handover functionality introduced back in Linux 6.16.
- Kernel file-mapped folios introduce the notion of "kernel file pages".
- Extending PR_SET_THP_DISABLE to allow individual processes to opt-out of THP always behavior into "madvise" THP mode without affecting other running workloads on the system.
- Tiny optimizations for large read operations to enhance the page cache read path.
- Adding persistent huge zero folio support.
- The Zpool indirection layer has been removed.
- Enhancements around Rust allocator support. There is also now Rust abstractions for maple trees, driven by Nouveau and Nova driver needs.
- The preliminary code intrdoucing swap tables as swap cache.
- A number of improvements to the out-of-memory (OOM) killer.
This complements the other [3]non-MM pull request to also already having been merged for Linux 6.18.
[4]
More details on the many patches making up the MM feature pull for Linux 6.18 via [5]this pull .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.18
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Kexec+Handover
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-Non-MM-PR
[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=linux_618_mm_lrg
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251001190218.f33f695b869696c2df9e841d@linux-foundation.org/T/#u
Andrew Morton submitted the big set of MM changes for Linux 6.18. The highlights this cycle from the long list of patches include:
- Improvements to the cluster scan strategy for the swapping code. This improves the large allocation performance. A Tencent engineer found that for a kernel build test with 96 jobs and 10G of zRAM with 64KkB mTHP enabled, the system time was nearly halved and also saw a lower swap failure rate.
- Improvements to the [2]Kexec Handover functionality introduced back in Linux 6.16.
- Kernel file-mapped folios introduce the notion of "kernel file pages".
- Extending PR_SET_THP_DISABLE to allow individual processes to opt-out of THP always behavior into "madvise" THP mode without affecting other running workloads on the system.
- Tiny optimizations for large read operations to enhance the page cache read path.
- Adding persistent huge zero folio support.
- The Zpool indirection layer has been removed.
- Enhancements around Rust allocator support. There is also now Rust abstractions for maple trees, driven by Nouveau and Nova driver needs.
- The preliminary code intrdoucing swap tables as swap cache.
- A number of improvements to the out-of-memory (OOM) killer.
This complements the other [3]non-MM pull request to also already having been merged for Linux 6.18.
[4]
More details on the many patches making up the MM feature pull for Linux 6.18 via [5]this pull .
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Linux+6.18
[2] https://www.phoronix.com/search/Kexec+Handover
[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-Non-MM-PR
[4] https://www.phoronix.com/image-viewer.php?id=2025&image=linux_618_mm_lrg
[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20251001190218.f33f695b869696c2df9e841d@linux-foundation.org/T/#u