Re: [patch 0/4] [RFC] Another proportional weight IO controller

[Divyesh Shah]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 1:46 PM, Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 10:41:57AM -0800, Divyesh Shah wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 7:58 AM, Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 06:05:58PM +0900, Ryo Tsuruta wrote:
> > > > Hi,
> > > >
> > > > From: vgoyal@xxxxxxxxxx
> > > > Subject: [patch 0/4] [RFC] Another proportional weight IO controller
> > > > Date: Thu, 06 Nov 2008 10:30:22 -0500
> > > >
> > > > > Hi,
> > > > >
> > > > > If you are not already tired of so many io controller implementations, here
> > > > > is another one.
> > > > >
> > > > > This is a very eary very crude implementation to get early feedback to see
> > > > > if this approach makes any sense or not.
> > > > >
> > > > > This controller is a proportional weight IO controller primarily
> > > > > based on/inspired by dm-ioband. One of the things I personally found little
> > > > > odd about dm-ioband was need of a dm-ioband device for every device we want
> > > > > to control.  I thought that probably we can make this control per request
> > > > > queue and get rid of device mapper driver. This should make configuration
> > > > > aspect easy.
> > > > >
> > > > > I have picked up quite some amount of code from dm-ioband especially for
> > > > > biocgroup implementation.
> > > > >
> > > > > I have done very basic testing and that is running 2-3 dd commands in different
> > > > > cgroups on x86_64. Wanted to throw out the code early to get some feedback.
> > > > >
> > > > > More details about the design and how to are in documentation patch.
> > > > >
> > > > > Your comments are welcome.
> > > >
> > > > Do you have any benchmark results?
> > > > I'm especially interested in the followings:
> > > > - Comparison of disk performance with and without the I/O controller patch.
> > >
> > > If I dynamically disable the bio control, then I did not observe any
> > > impact on performance. Because in that case practically it boils down
> > > to just an additional variable check in __make_request().
> > >
> > > > - Put uneven I/O loads. Processes, which belong to a cgroup which is
> > > >   given a smaller weight than another cgroup, put heavier I/O load
> > > >   like the following.
> > > >
> > > >      echo 1024 > /cgroup/bio/test1/bio.shares
> > > >      echo 8192 > /cgroup/bio/test2/bio.shares
> > > >
> > > >      echo $$ > /cgroup/bio/test1/tasks
> > > >      dd if=/somefile1-1 of=/dev/null &
> > > >      dd if=/somefile1-2 of=/dev/null &
> > > >      ...
> > > >      dd if=/somefile1-100 of=/dev/null
> > > >      echo $$ > /cgroup/bio/test2/tasks
> > > >      dd if=/somefile2-1 of=/dev/null &
> > > >      dd if=/somefile2-2 of=/dev/null &
> > > >      ...
> > > >      dd if=/somefile2-10 of=/dev/null &
> > >
> > > I have not tried this case.
> > >
> > > Ryo, do you still want to stick to two level scheduling? Given the problem
> > > of it breaking down underlying scheduler's assumptions, probably it makes
> > > more sense to the IO control at each individual IO scheduler.
> >
> > Vivek,
> >      I agree with you that 2 layer scheduler *might* invalidate some
> > IO scheduler assumptions (though some testing might help here to
> > confirm that). However, one big concern I have with proportional
> > division at the IO scheduler level is that there is no means of doing
> > admission control at the request queue for the device. What we need is
> > request queue partitioning per cgroup.
> >     Consider that I want to divide my disk's bandwidth among 3
> > cgroups(A, B and C) equally. But say some tasks in the cgroup A flood
> > the disk with IO requests and completely use up all of the requests in
> > the rq resulting in the following IOs to be blocked on a slot getting
> > empty in the rq thus affecting their overall latency. One might argue
> > that over the long term though we'll get equal bandwidth division
> > between these cgroups. But now consider that cgroup A has tasks that
> > always storm the disk with large number of IOs which can be a problem
> > for other cgroups.
> >     This actually becomes an even larger problem when we want to
> > support high priority requests as they may get blocked behind other
> > lower priority requests which have used up all the available requests
> > in the rq. With request queue division we can achieve this easily by
> > having tasks requiring high priority IO belong to a different cgroup.
> > dm-ioband and any other 2-level scheduler can do this easily.
> >
>
> Hi Divyesh,
>
> I understand that request descriptors can be a bottleneck here. But that
> should be an issue even today with CFQ where a low priority process
> consume lots of request descriptors and prevent higher priority process
> from submitting the request.

Yes that is true and that is one of the main reasons why I would lean
towards 2-level scheduler coz you get request queue division as well.

 I think you already said it and I just
> reiterated it.
>
> I think in that case we need to do something about request descriptor
> allocation instead of relying on 2nd level of IO scheduler.
> At this point I am not sure what to do. May be we can take feedback from the
> respective queue (like cfqq) of submitting application and if it is already
> backlogged beyond a certain limit, then we can put that application to sleep
> and stop it from consuming excessive amount of request descriptors
> (despite the fact that we have free request descriptors).

This should be done per-cgroup rather than per-process.

IMHO, to abandon the 2-level approach without having a solid plan for
tackling this issue might not be the best idea coz that will
invalidate the SLA that the proportional b/w controller promises.

>
> Thanks
> Vivek
>
> > -Divyesh
> >
> > >
> > > I have had a very brief look at BFQ's hierarchical proportional
> > > weight/priority IO control and it looks good. May be we can adopt it for
> > > other IO schedulers also.
> > >
> > > Thanks
> > > Vivek
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