In most cases, it is detrimental for throughput to plug I/O dispatch
when the in-service bfq_queue becomes temporarily empty (plugging is
performed to wait for the possible arrival, soon, of new I/O from the
in-service queue). There is however a case where plugging is needed
for service guarantees. If a bfq_queue, say Q, has a higher weight
than some other active bfq_queue, and is sync, i.e., contains sync
I/O, then, to guarantee that Q does receive a higher share of the
throughput than other lower-weight queues, it is necessary to plug I/O
dispatch when Q remains temporarily empty while being served.

For this reason, BFQ performs I/O plugging when some active bfq_queue
has a higher weight than some other active bfq_queue. But this is
unnecessarily overkill. In fact, if the in-service bfq_queue actually
has a weight lower than or equal to the other queues, then the queue
*must not* be guaranteed a higher share of the throughput than the
other queues. So, not plugging I/O cannot cause any harm to the
queue. And can boost throughput.

Taking advantage of this fact, this commit does not plug I/O for sync
bfq_queues with a weight lower than or equal to the weights of the
other queues. Here is an example of the resulting throughput boost
with the dbench workload, which is particularly nasty for BFQ. With
the dbench test in the Phoronix suite, BFQ reaches its lowest total
throughput with 6 clients on a filesystem with journaling, in case the
journaling daemon has a higher weight than normal processes. Before
this commit, the total throughput was ~80 MB/sec on a PLEXTOR PX-256M5,
after this commit it is ~100 MB/sec.
Tested-by: Holger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>