Commits
Mike Snitzer committed 6acfe68bac7
dm: fix excessive dm-mq context switching Request-based DM's blk-mq support (dm-mq) was reported to be 50% slower than if an underlying null_blk device were used directly. One of the reasons for this drop in performance is that blk_insert_clone_request() was calling blk_mq_insert_request() with @async=true. This forced the use of kblockd_schedule_delayed_work_on() to run the blk-mq hw queues which ushered in ping-ponging between process context (fio in this case) and kblockd's kworker to submit the cloned request. The ftrace function_graph tracer showed: kworker-2013 => fio-12190 fio-12190 => kworker-2013 ... kworker-2013 => fio-12190 fio-12190 => kworker-2013 ... Fixing blk_insert_clone_request()'s blk_mq_insert_request() call to _not_ use kblockd to submit the cloned requests isn't enough to eliminate the observed context switches. In addition to this dm-mq specific blk-core fix, there are 2 DM core fixes to dm-mq that (when paired with the blk-core fix) completely eliminate the observed context switching: 1) don't blk_mq_run_hw_queues in blk-mq request completion Motivated by desire to reduce overhead of dm-mq, punting to kblockd just increases context switches. In my testing against a really fast null_blk device there was no benefit to running blk_mq_run_hw_queues() on completion (and no other blk-mq driver does this). So hopefully this change doesn't induce the need for yet another revert like commit 621739b00e16ca2d ! 2) use blk_mq_complete_request() in dm_complete_request() blk_complete_request() doesn't offer the traditional q->mq_ops vs .request_fn branching pattern that other historic block interfaces do (e.g. blk_get_request). Using blk_mq_complete_request() for blk-mq requests is important for performance. It should be noted that, like blk_complete_request(), blk_mq_complete_request() doesn't natively handle partial completions -- but the request-based DM-multipath target does provide the required partial completion support by dm.c:end_clone_bio() triggering requeueing of the request via dm-mpath.c:multipath_end_io()'s return of DM_ENDIO_REQUEUE. dm-mq fix #2 is _much_ more important than #1 for eliminating the context switches. Before: cpu : usr=15.10%, sys=59.39%, ctx=7905181, majf=0, minf=475 After: cpu : usr=20.60%, sys=79.35%, ctx=2008, majf=0, minf=472 With these changes multithreaded async read IOPs improved from ~950K to ~1350K for this dm-mq stacked on null_blk test-case. The raw read IOPs of the underlying null_blk device for the same workload is ~1950K. Fixes: 7fb4898e0 ("block: add blk-mq support to blk_insert_cloned_request()") Fixes: bfebd1cdb ("dm: add full blk-mq support to request-based DM") Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org # 4.1+ Reported-by: Sagi Grimberg <sagig@dev.mellanox.co.il> Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com> Acked-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>