linux-imx

block, bfq: tune service injection basing on request service times

The processes associated with a bfq_queue, say Q, may happen to
generate their cumulative I/O at a lower rate than the rate at which
the device could serve the same I/O. This is rather probable, e.g., if
only one process is associated with Q and the device is an SSD. It
results in Q becoming often empty while in service. If BFQ is not
allowed to switch to another queue when Q becomes empty, then, during
the service of Q, there will be frequent "service holes", i.e., time
intervals during which Q gets empty and the device can only consume
the I/O already queued in its hardware queues. This easily causes
considerable losses of throughput.

To counter this problem, BFQ implements a request injection mechanism,
which tries to fill the above service holes with I/O requests taken
from other bfq_queues. The hard part in this mechanism is finding the
right amount of I/O to inject, so as to both boost throughput and not
break Q's bandwidth and latency guarantees. To this goal, the current
version of this mechanism measures the bandwidth enjoyed by Q while it
is being served, and tries to inject the maximum possible amount of
extra service that does not cause Q's bandwidth to decrease too
much.

This solution has an important shortcoming. For bandwidth measurements
to be stable and reliable, Q must remain in service for a much longer
time than that needed to serve a single I/O request. Unfortunately,
this does not hold with many workloads. This commit addresses this
issue by changing the way the amount of injection allowed is
dynamically computed. It tunes injection as a function of the service
times of single I/O requests of Q, instead of Q's
bandwidth. Single-request service times are evidently meaningful even
if Q gets very few I/O requests completed while it is in service.

As a testbed for this new solution, we measured the throughput reached
by BFQ for one of the nastiest workloads and configurations for this
scheduler: the workload generated by the dbench test (in the Phoronix
suite), with 6 clients, on a filesystem with journaling, and with the
journaling daemon enjoying a higher weight than normal processes.
With this commit, the throughput grows from ~100 MB/s to ~150 MB/s on
a PLEXTOR PX-256M5.

Tested-by: Holger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Tested-by: Francesco Pollicino <fra.fra.800@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>