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Paolo Valente authored
Consider a sync bfq_queue Q that remains empty while in service, and suppose that, when this happens, there is a fair amount of already in-flight I/O not belonging to Q. In such a situation, I/O dispatching may need to be plugged (until new I/O arrives for Q), for the following reason. The drive may decide to serve in-flight non-Q's I/O requests before Q's ones, thereby delaying the arrival of new I/O requests for Q (recall that Q is sync). If I/O-dispatching is not plugged, then, while Q remains empty, a basically uncontrolled amount of I/O from other queues may be dispatched too, possibly causing the service of Q's I/O to be delayed even longer in the drive. This problem gets more and more serious as the speed and the queue depth of the drive grow, because, as these two quantities grow, the probability to find no queue busy but many requests in flight grows too. If Q has the same weight and priority as the other queues, then the above delay is unlikely to cause any issue, because all queues tend to undergo the same treatment. So, since not plugging I/O dispatching is convenient for throughput, it is better not to plug. Things change in case Q has a higher weight or priority than some other queue, because Q's service guarantees may simply be violated. For this reason, commit 1de0c4cd ("block, bfq: reduce idling only in symmetric scenarios") does plug I/O in such an asymmetric scenario. Plugging minimizes the delay induced by already in-flight I/O, and enables Q to recover the bandwidth it may lose because of this delay. Yet the above commit does not cover the case of weight-raised queues, for efficiency concerns. For weight-raised queues, I/O-dispatch plugging is activated simply if not all bfq_queues are weight-raised. But this check does not handle the case of in-flight requests, because a bfq_queue may become non busy *before* all its in-flight requests are completed. This commit performs I/O-dispatch plugging for weight-raised queues if there are some in-flight requests. As a practical example of the resulting recover of control, under write load on a Samsung SSD 970 PRO, gnome-terminal starts in 1.5 seconds after this fix, against 15 seconds before the fix (as a reference, gnome-terminal takes about 35 seconds to start with any of the other I/O schedulers). Fixes: 1de0c4cd ("block, bfq: reduce idling only in symmetric scenarios") Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
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