From 44e44a1b329ed37a98bc41ab21fb6897d5a922ac Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Paolo Valente Date: Wed, 12 Apr 2017 18:23:12 +0200 Subject: block, bfq: improve responsiveness This patch introduces a simple heuristic to load applications quickly, and to perform the I/O requested by interactive applications just as quickly. To this purpose, both a newly-created queue and a queue associated with an interactive application (we explain in a moment how BFQ decides whether the associated application is interactive), receive the following two special treatments: 1) The weight of the queue is raised. 2) The queue unconditionally enjoys device idling when it empties; in fact, if the requests of a queue are sync, then performing device idling for the queue is a necessary condition to guarantee that the queue receives a fraction of the throughput proportional to its weight (see [1] for details). For brevity, we call just weight-raising the combination of these two preferential treatments. For a newly-created queue, weight-raising starts immediately and lasts for a time interval that: 1) depends on the device speed and type (rotational or non-rotational), and 2) is equal to the time needed to load (start up) a large-size application on that device, with cold caches and with no additional workload. Finally, as for guaranteeing a fast execution to interactive, I/O-related tasks (such as opening a file), consider that any interactive application blocks and waits for user input both after starting up and after executing some task. After a while, the user may trigger new operations, after which the application stops again, and so on. Accordingly, the low-latency heuristic weight-raises again a queue in case it becomes backlogged after being idle for a sufficiently long (configurable) time. The weight-raising then lasts for the same time as for a just-created queue. According to our experiments, the combination of this low-latency heuristic and of the improvements described in the previous patch allows BFQ to guarantee a high application responsiveness. [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe --- Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt | 9 +++++++++ 1 file changed, 9 insertions(+) (limited to 'Documentation/block') diff --git a/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt b/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt index 461b27fce979..1b87df6cd476 100644 --- a/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt +++ b/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt @@ -375,6 +375,11 @@ default, low latency mode is enabled. If enabled, interactive and soft real-time applications are privileged and experience a lower latency, as explained in more detail in the description of how BFQ works. +DO NOT enable this mode if you need full control on bandwidth +distribution. In fact, if it is enabled, then BFQ automatically +increases the bandwidth share of privileged applications, as the main +means to guarantee a lower latency to them. + timeout_sync ------------ @@ -507,6 +512,10 @@ linear mapping between ioprio and weights, described at the beginning of the tunable section, is still valid, but all weights higher than IOPRIO_BE_NR*10 are mapped to ioprio 0. +Recall that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the +weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time +applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights. + [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System -- cgit v1.2.3