• Shaohua Li's avatar
    blk-throttle: add a simple idle detection · 9e234eea
    Shaohua Li authored
    A cgroup gets assigned a low limit, but the cgroup could never dispatch
    enough IO to cross the low limit. In such case, the queue state machine
    will remain in LIMIT_LOW state and all other cgroups will be throttled
    according to low limit. This is unfair for other cgroups. We should
    treat the cgroup idle and upgrade the state machine to lower state.
    
    We also have a downgrade logic. If the state machine upgrades because of
    cgroup idle (real idle), the state machine will downgrade soon as the
    cgroup is below its low limit. This isn't what we want. A more
    complicated case is cgroup isn't idle when queue is in LIMIT_LOW. But
    when queue gets upgraded to lower state, other cgroups could dispatch
    more IO and this cgroup can't dispatch enough IO, so the cgroup is below
    its low limit and looks like idle (fake idle). In this case, the queue
    should downgrade soon. The key to determine if we should do downgrade is
    to detect if cgroup is truely idle.
    
    Unfortunately it's very hard to determine if a cgroup is real idle. This
    patch uses the 'think time check' idea from CFQ for the purpose. Please
    note, the idea doesn't work for all workloads. For example, a workload
    with io depth 8 has disk utilization 100%, hence think time is 0, eg,
    not idle. But the workload can run higher bandwidth with io depth 16.
    Compared to io depth 16, the io depth 8 workload is idle. We use the
    idea to roughly determine if a cgroup is idle.
    
    We treat a cgroup idle if its think time is above a threshold (by
    default 1ms for SSD and 100ms for HD). The idea is think time above the
    threshold will start to harm performance. HD is much slower so a longer
    think time is ok.
    
    The patch (and the latter patches) uses 'unsigned long' to track time.
    We convert 'ns' to 'us' with 'ns >> 10'. This is fast but loses
    precision, should not a big deal.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarShaohua Li <shli@fb.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
    9e234eea
bio.c 51.1 KB