block, bfq: add Early Queue Merge (EQM)
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>
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