• Mike Snitzer's avatar
    dm: fix excessive dm-mq context switching · 7f4c67d5
    Mike Snitzer authored
    commit 6acfe68b upstream.
    
    Request-based DM's blk-mq support (dm-mq) was reported to be 50% slower
    than if an underlying null_blk device were used directly.  One of the
    reasons for this drop in performance is that blk_insert_clone_request()
    was calling blk_mq_insert_request() with @async=true.  This forced the
    use of kblockd_schedule_delayed_work_on() to run the blk-mq hw queues
    which ushered in ping-ponging between process context (fio in this case)
    and kblockd's kworker to submit the cloned request.  The ftrace
    function_graph tracer showed:
    
      kworker-2013  =>   fio-12190
      fio-12190    =>  kworker-2013
      ...
      kworker-2013  =>   fio-12190
      fio-12190    =>  kworker-2013
      ...
    
    Fixing blk_insert_clone_request()'s blk_mq_insert_request() call to
    _not_ use kblockd to submit the cloned requests isn't enough to
    eliminate the observed context switches.
    
    In addition to this dm-mq specific blk-core fix, there are 2 DM core
    fixes to dm-mq that (when paired with the blk-core fix) completely
    eliminate the observed context switching:
    
    1)  don't blk_mq_run_hw_queues in blk-mq request completion
    
        Motivated by desire to reduce overhead of dm-mq, punting to kblockd
        just increases context switches.
    
        In my testing against a really fast null_blk device there was no benefit
        to running blk_mq_run_hw_queues() on completion (and no other blk-mq
        driver does this).  So hopefully this change doesn't induce the need for
        yet another revert like commit 621739b0 !
    
    2)  use blk_mq_complete_request() in dm_complete_request()
    
        blk_complete_request() doesn't offer the traditional q->mq_ops vs
        .request_fn branching pattern that other historic block interfaces
        do (e.g. blk_get_request).  Using blk_mq_complete_request() for
        blk-mq requests is important for performance.  It should be noted
        that, like blk_complete_request(), blk_mq_complete_request() doesn't
        natively handle partial completions -- but the request-based
        DM-multipath target does provide the required partial completion
        support by dm.c:end_clone_bio() triggering requeueing of the request
        via dm-mpath.c:multipath_end_io()'s return of DM_ENDIO_REQUEUE.
    
    dm-mq fix #2 is _much_ more important than #1 for eliminating the
    context switches.
    Before: cpu          : usr=15.10%, sys=59.39%, ctx=7905181, majf=0, minf=475
    After:  cpu          : usr=20.60%, sys=79.35%, ctx=2008, majf=0, minf=472
    
    With these changes multithreaded async read IOPs improved from ~950K
    to ~1350K for this dm-mq stacked on null_blk test-case.  The raw read
    IOPs of the underlying null_blk device for the same workload is ~1950K.
    
    Fixes: 7fb4898e ("block: add blk-mq support to blk_insert_cloned_request()")
    Fixes: bfebd1cd ("dm: add full blk-mq support to request-based DM")
    Reported-by: default avatarSagi Grimberg <sagig@dev.mellanox.co.il>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
    Acked-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
    7f4c67d5
blk-core.c 93.9 KB