linux-imx

block, bfq: inject other-queue I/O into seeky idle queues on NCQ flash

The Achilles' heel of BFQ is its failing to reach a high throughput
with sync random I/O on flash storage with internal queueing, in case
the processes doing I/O have differentiated weights.

The cause of this failure is as follows. If at least two processes do
sync I/O, and have a different weight from each other, then BFQ plugs
I/O dispatching every time one of these processes, while it is being
served, remains temporarily without pending I/O requests. This
plugging is necessary to guarantee that every process enjoys a
bandwidth proportional to its weight; but it empties the internal
queue(s) of the drive. And this kills throughput with random I/O. So,
if some processes have differentiated weights and do both sync and
random I/O, the end result is a throughput collapse.

This commit tries to counter this problem by injecting the service of
other processes, in a controlled way, while the process in service
happens to have no I/O. This injection is performed only if the medium
is non rotational and performs internal queueing, and the process in
service does random I/O (service injection might be beneficial for
sequential I/O too, we'll work on that).

As an example of the benefits of this commit, on a PLEXTOR PX-256M5S
SSD, and with five processes having differentiated weights and doing
sync random 4KB I/O, this commit makes the throughput with bfq grow by
400%, from 25 to 100MB/s. This higher throughput is 10MB/s lower than
that reached with none. As some less random I/O is added to the mix,
the throughput becomes equal to or higher than that with none.

This commit is a very first attempt to recover throughput without
losing control, and certainly has many limitations. One is, e.g., that
the processes whose service is injected are not chosen so as to
distribute the extra bandwidth they receive in accordance to their
weights. Thus there might be loss of weighted fairness in some
cases. Anyway, this loss concerns extra service, which would not have
been received at all without this commit. Other limitations and issues
will probably show up with usage.

Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>