block, bfq: improve responsiveness
This patch introduces a simple heuristic to load applications quickly, and to perform the I/O requested by interactive applications just as quickly. To this purpose, both a newly-created queue and a queue associated with an interactive application (we explain in a moment how BFQ decides whether the associated application is interactive), receive the following two special treatments: 1) The weight of the queue is raised. 2) The queue unconditionally enjoys device idling when it empties; in fact, if the requests of a queue are sync, then performing device idling for the queue is a necessary condition to guarantee that the queue receives a fraction of the throughput proportional to its weight (see [1] for details). For brevity, we call just weight-raising the combination of these two preferential treatments. For a newly-created queue, weight-raising starts immediately and lasts for a time interval that: 1) depends on the device speed and type (rotational or non-rotational), and 2) is equal to the time needed to load (start up) a large-size application on that device, with cold caches and with no additional workload. Finally, as for guaranteeing a fast execution to interactive, I/O-related tasks (such as opening a file), consider that any interactive application blocks and waits for user input both after starting up and after executing some task. After a while, the user may trigger new operations, after which the application stops again, and so on. Accordingly, the low-latency heuristic weight-raises again a queue in case it becomes backlogged after being idle for a sufficiently long (configurable) time. The weight-raising then lasts for the same time as for a just-created queue. According to our experiments, the combination of this low-latency heuristic and of the improvements described in the previous patch allows BFQ to guarantee a high application responsiveness. [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdfSigned-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
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