raid5: offload stripe handle to workqueue
This is another attempt to create multiple threads to handle raid5 stripes. This time I use workqueue. raid5 handles request (especially write) in stripe unit. A stripe is page size aligned/long and acrosses all disks. Writing to any disk sector, raid5 runs a state machine for the corresponding stripe, which includes reading some disks of the stripe, calculating parity, and writing some disks of the stripe. The state machine is running in raid5d thread currently. Since there is only one thread, it doesn't scale well for high speed storage. An obvious solution is multi-threading. To get better performance, we have some requirements: a. locality. stripe corresponding to request submitted from one cpu is better handled in thread in local cpu or local node. local cpu is preferred but some times could be a bottleneck, for example, parity calculation is too heavy. local node running has wide adaptability. b. configurablity. Different setup of raid5 array might need diffent configuration. Especially the thread number. More threads don't always mean better performance because of lock contentions. My original implementation is creating some kernel threads. There are interfaces to control which cpu's stripe each thread should handle. And userspace can set affinity of the threads. This provides biggest flexibility and configurability. But it's hard to use and apparently a new thread pool implementation is disfavor. Recent workqueue improvement is quite promising. unbound workqueue will be bound to numa node. If WQ_SYSFS is set in workqueue, there are sysfs option to do affinity setting. For example, we can only include one HT sibling in affinity. Since work is non-reentrant by default, and we can control running thread number by limiting dispatched work_struct number. In this patch, I created several stripe worker group. A group is a numa node. stripes from cpus of one node will be added to a group list. Workqueue thread of one node will only handle stripes of worker group of the node. In this way, stripe handling has numa node locality. And as I said, we can control thread number by limiting dispatched work_struct number. The work_struct callback function handles several stripes in one run. A typical work queue usage is to run one unit in each work_struct. In raid5 case, the unit is a stripe. But we can't do that: a. Though handling a stripe doesn't need lock because of reference accounting and stripe isn't in any list, queuing a work_struct for each stripe will make workqueue lock contended very heavily. b. blk_start_plug()/blk_finish_plug() should surround stripe handle, as we might dispatch request. If each work_struct only handles one stripe, such block plug is meaningless. This implementation can't do very fine grained configuration. But the numa binding is most popular usage model, should be enough for most workloads. Note: since we have only one stripe queue, switching to multi-thread might decrease request size dispatching down to low level layer. The impact depends on thread number, raid configuration and workload. So multi-thread raid5 might not be proper for all setups. Changes V1 -> V2: 1. remove WQ_NON_REENTRANT 2. disabling multi-threading by default 3. Add more descriptions in changelog Signed-off-by:Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com> Signed-off-by:
NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Showing
Please register or sign in to comment