• Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk's avatar
    xen/blkback: Stick REQ_SYNC on WRITEs to deal with CFQ I/O scheduler. · 013c3ca1
    Konrad Rzeszutek Wilk authored
    If one runs a simple fio request with random read/write with a
    20%/80% ratio, the numbers are incredibly bad when using the CFQ scheduler.
    
    IOmeter       |       |      |          |
    64K, randrw   |  NOOP | CFQ  | deadline |
    randrwmix=80  |       |      |          |
    --------------+-------+------+----------+
    blkback       |103/27 |32/10 | 102/27   |
    --------------+-------+------+----------+
    QEMU qdisk    |103/27 |102/27| 102/27   |
    
    The problem as explained by Vivek Goyal was:
    
    ".. that difference is that sync vs async requests. In the case of
    a kernel thread submitting IO, [..] all the WRITES might be being
    considered as async and will go in a different queue. If you mix those
    with some READS, they are always sync and will go in differnet queue.
    In presence of sync queue, CFQ will idle and choke up WRITES in
    an attempt to improve latencies of READs.
    
    In case of AIO [note: this is what QEMU qdisk is doing] , [..]
    it is direct IO and both READS and WRITES will be considered SYNC
    and will go in a single queue and no choking of WRITES will take place."
    
    The solution is quite simple, tack on REQ_SYNC (which is
    what the WRITE_ODIRECT macro points to) and the numbers go
    back up.
    
    Suggested-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com
    Signed-off-by: default avatarKonrad Rzeszutek Wilk <konrad.wilk@oracle.com>
    013c3ca1
blkback.c 22.4 KB