mainlining shenanigans
7b8fa3b900
In BFQ and CFQ, two processes are said to be cooperating if they do I/O in such a way that the union of their I/O requests yields a sequential I/O pattern. To get such a sequential I/O pattern out of the non-sequential pattern of each cooperating process, BFQ and CFQ merge the queues associated with these processes. In more detail, cooperating processes, and thus their associated queues, usually start, or restart, to do I/O shortly after each other. This is the case, e.g., for the I/O threads of KVM/QEMU and of the dump utility. Basing on this assumption, this commit allows a bfq_queue to be merged only during a short time interval (100ms) after it starts, or re-starts, to do I/O. This filtering provides two important benefits. First, it greatly reduces the probability that two non-cooperating processes have their queues merged by mistake, if they just happen to do I/O close to each other for a short time interval. These spurious merges cause loss of service guarantees. A low-weight bfq_queue may unjustly get more than its expected share of the throughput: if such a low-weight queue is merged with a high-weight queue, then the I/O for the low-weight queue is served as if the queue had a high weight. This may damage other high-weight queues unexpectedly. For instance, because of this issue, lxterminal occasionally took 7.5 seconds to start, instead of 6.5 seconds, when some sequential readers and writers did I/O in the background on a FUJITSU MHX2300BT HDD. The reason is that the bfq_queues associated with some of the readers or the writers were merged with the high-weight queues of some processes that had to do some urgent but little I/O. The readers then exploited the inherited high weight for all or most of their I/O, during the start-up of terminal. The filtering introduced by this commit eliminated any outlier caused by spurious queue merges in our start-up time tests. This filtering also provides a little boost of the throughput sustainable by BFQ: 3-4%, depending on the CPU. The reason is that, once a bfq_queue cannot be merged any longer, this commit makes BFQ stop updating the data needed to handle merging for the queue. Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk> |
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| firmware | ||
| fs | ||
| include | ||
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| ipc | ||
| kernel | ||
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| README | ||
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.