By ignoring the sentinels the cleaner policy is able to write-back dirty
cache data much faster. There is no reason to respect the sentinels,
which denote that a block was changed recently, when using the cleaner
policy given that the cleaner is tasked with writing back all dirty
data.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
The cache policy interfaces have been updated to work well with the new
bio-prison v2 interface's ability to queue work immediately (promotion,
demotion, etc) -- overriding benefit being reduced latency on processing
IO through the cache. Previously such work would be left for the DM
cache core to queue on various lists and then process in batches later
-- this caused a serious delay in latency for IO driven by the cache.
The background tracker code was factored out so that all cache policies
can make use of it.
Also, the "cleaner" policy has been removed and is now a variant of the
smq policy that simply disallows migrations.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
For smq the 32 bit 'hint' stores the multiqueue level that the entry
should be stored in. If a different policy has been used previously,
and then switched to smq, the hints will be invalid. In which case we
used to put all entries in the bottom level of the multiqueue, and then
redistribute. Redistribution is faster if we put entries with invalid
hints in random levels initially.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
It's far quicker to always delete the hint array and recreate with
dm_array_new() because we avoid the copying caused by mutation.
Also simplifies the policy interface, replacing the walk_hints() with
the simpler get_hint().
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
smq seems to be performing better than the old mq policy in all
situations, as well as using a quarter of the memory.
Make 'mq' an alias for 'smq' when choosing a cache policy. The tunables
that were present for the old mq are faked, and have no effect. mq
should be considered deprecated now.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
ffs counts bit starting with 1 (for the least significant bit), __ffs
counts bits starting with 0. This patch changes various occurrences of ffs
to __ffs and removes subtraction of 1 from the result.
Note that __ffs (unlike ffs) is not defined when called with zero
argument, but it is not called with zero argument in any of these cases.
Signed-off-by: Mikulas Patocka <mpatocka@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
We no longer sleep in any of the smq functions, so this can become a
spinlock. Switching from mutex to spinlock improves performance when
the fast cache device is a very low latency device (e.g. NVMe SSD).
The switch to spinlock also allows for removal of the extra tick_lock;
which is no longer needed since the main lock being a spinlock now
fulfills the locking requirements needed by interrupt context.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
When creating dm-cache with the default policy, it will call
request_module("dm-cache-default") to register the default policy.
But the "dm-cache-default" alias was left referring to the MQ policy.
Fix this by moving the module alias to SMQ.
Fixes: bccab6a0 (dm cache: switch the "default" cache replacement policy from mq to smq)
Signed-off-by: Yi Zhang <yizhan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
static analysis by cppcheck has found a check on alloc_bitset that
always evaluates as false and hence never finds an allocation failure:
[drivers/md/dm-cache-policy-smq.c:1689]: (warning) Logical conjunction
always evaluates to false: !EXPR && EXPR.
Fix this by removing the incorrect mq->cache_hit_bits check
Signed-off-by: Colin Ian King <colin.king@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Commit bccab6a0 ("dm cache: switch the "default" cache replacement
policy from mq to smq") should've incremented the "default" policy's
version number to 1.4.0 rather than reverting to version 1.0.0.
Reported-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
The Stochastic multiqueue (SMQ) policy (vs MQ) offers the promise of
less memory utilization, improved performance and increased adaptability
in the face of changing workloads. SMQ also does not have any
cumbersome tuning knobs.
Users may switch from "mq" to "smq" simply by appropriately reloading a
DM table that is using the cache target. Doing so will cause all of the
mq policy's hints to be dropped. Also, performance of the cache may
degrade slightly until smq recalculates the origin device's hotspots
that should be cached.
In the future the "mq" policy will just silently make use of "smq" and
the mq code will be removed.
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
The policy tick() method is normally called from interrupt context.
Both the mq and smq policies do some bottom half work for the tick
method in their map functions. However if no IO is going through the
cache, then that bottom half work doesn't occur. With these policies
this means recently hit entries do not age and do not get written
back as early as we'd like.
Fix this by introducing a new 'can_block' parameter to the tick()
method. When this is set the bottom half work occurs immediately.
'can_block' is set when the tick method is called every second by the
core target (not in interrupt context).
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
The stochastic-multi-queue (smq) policy addresses some of the problems
with the current multiqueue (mq) policy.
Memory usage
------------
The mq policy uses a lot of memory; 88 bytes per cache block on a 64
bit machine.
SMQ uses 28bit indexes to implement it's data structures rather than
pointers. It avoids storing an explicit hit count for each block. It
has a 'hotspot' queue rather than a pre cache which uses a quarter of
the entries (each hotspot block covers a larger area than a single
cache block).
All these mean smq uses ~25bytes per cache block. Still a lot of
memory, but a substantial improvement nontheless.
Level balancing
---------------
MQ places entries in different levels of the multiqueue structures
based on their hit count (~ln(hit count)). This means the bottom
levels generally have the most entries, and the top ones have very
few. Having unbalanced levels like this reduces the efficacy of the
multiqueue.
SMQ does not maintain a hit count, instead it swaps hit entries with
the least recently used entry from the level above. The over all
ordering being a side effect of this stochastic process. With this
scheme we can decide how many entries occupy each multiqueue level,
resulting in better promotion/demotion decisions.
Adaptability
------------
The MQ policy maintains a hit count for each cache block. For a
different block to get promoted to the cache it's hit count has to
exceed the lowest currently in the cache. This means it can take a
long time for the cache to adapt between varying IO patterns.
Periodically degrading the hit counts could help with this, but I
haven't found a nice general solution.
SMQ doesn't maintain hit counts, so a lot of this problem just goes
away. In addition it tracks performance of the hotspot queue, which
is used to decide which blocks to promote. If the hotspot queue is
performing badly then it starts moving entries more quickly between
levels. This lets it adapt to new IO patterns very quickly.
Performance
-----------
In my tests SMQ shows substantially better performance than MQ. Once
this matures a bit more I'm sure it'll become the default policy.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
