A set of processes may happen to perform interleaved reads, i.e.,
read requests whose union would give rise to a sequential read pattern.
There are two typical cases: first, processes reading fixed-size chunks
of data at a fixed distance from each other; second, processes reading
variable-size chunks at variable distances. The latter case occurs for
example with QEMU, which splits the I/O generated by a guest into
multiple chunks, and lets these chunks be served by a pool of I/O
threads, iteratively assigning the next chunk of I/O to the first
available thread. CFQ denotes as 'cooperating' a set of processes that
are doing interleaved I/O, and when it detects cooperating processes,
it merges their queues to obtain a sequential I/O pattern from the union
of their I/O requests, and hence boost the throughput.

Unfortunately, in the following frequent case, the mechanism
implemented in CFQ for detecting cooperating processes and merging
their queues is not responsive enough to handle also the fluctuating
I/O pattern of the second type of processes. Suppose that one process
of the second type issues a request close to the next request to serve
of another process of the same type. At that time the two processes
would be considered as cooperating. But, if the request issued by the
first process is to be merged with some other already-queued request,
then, from the moment at which this request arrives, to the moment
when CFQ controls whether the two processes are cooperating, the two
processes are likely to be already doing I/O in distant zones of the
disk surface or device memory.

CFQ uses however preemption to get a sequential read pattern out of
the read requests performed by the second type of processes too.  As a
consequence, CFQ uses two different mechanisms to achieve the same
goal: boosting the throughput with interleaved I/O.

This patch introduces Early Queue Merge (EQM), a unified mechanism to
get a sequential read pattern with both types of processes. The main
idea is to immediately check whether a newly-arrived request lets some
pair of processes become cooperating, both in the case of actual
request insertion and, to be responsive with the second type of
processes, in the case of request merge. Both types of processes are
then handled by just merging their queues.
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Mauro Andreolini <mauro.andreolini@unimore.it>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>