block, bfq: inject other-queue I/O into seeky idle queues on NCQ flash
[ Upstream commit d0edc247 ] 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> Signed-off-by: Sasha Levin <sashal@kernel.org>
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