Re: [PATCH 2/2] cfq-iosched: RQ_NOIDLE enabled for SYNC_WORKLOAD

[Vivek Goyal]

On Wed, Jul 07, 2010 at 05:23:47PM +0200, Corrado Zoccolo wrote:
> RQ_NOIDLE flag is meaningful and should be honored for SYNC_WORKLOAD,
> without further checks.
> RQ_NOIDLE can be used to mark the last request of a sequence for which
> - we want to idle between the requests of the sequence, to keep locality
> - we don't want to idle after the sequence, because we know that no new
>   nearby requests will follow, so we should switch servicing other
>   queues.

Corrado, in higher layers any WRITE_SYNC request currently is marked
as RQ_NOIDLE. At that point it is just not known whether there will be
another request after this or not. So I would not think of RQ_NOIDLE
as being conclusively telling us that this is last request in the
sequence.

I think requst being WRITE_SYNC, we just don't know if the application
is going to write more or not immediately. fsync, O_SYNC etc fall in
this category.

But in general I like the idea of getting rid of idling on as many cases
as possiblle. Jeff's recent posting to fix fsync issue depends on idling
even on WRITE_SYNC queues so your patch and his patchsets are
fundamentally incompatible.

Whether to idle on WRITE_SYNC or not, I will leave it to Jens (I just
don't know the answer to that question. :-)). But in general I want to
get rid of idling as much as possible otherwise it becomes a serious
bottleneck in any kind of performance testing on higher end storage.

At the same time not idling runs the risk of process doing WRITE_SYNC
not getting fair share in presence of sequential readers if writer does
not keep the queue busy.

I will do some testing with this patchset little later.

Thanks
Vivek

> This patch fixes this behaviour, making it similar to how it behaved
> before 8e55063, but still fixing the corner cases that were the
> motivation for it.
> 
> Signed-off-by: Corrado Zoccolo <czoccolo@xxxxxxxxx>
> ---
>  block/cfq-iosched.c |   15 ++++++++++-----
>  1 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-)
> 
> diff --git a/block/cfq-iosched.c b/block/cfq-iosched.c
> index 5ef9a5d..cac3afb 100644
> --- a/block/cfq-iosched.c
> +++ b/block/cfq-iosched.c
> @@ -3356,12 +3356,17 @@ static void cfq_completed_request(struct request_queue *q, struct request *rq)
>  				cfqd->noidle_tree_requires_idle |= bitmask;
>  
>  			/*
> -			 * Idling is enabled for SYNC_WORKLOAD.
> -			 * SYNC_NOIDLE_WORKLOAD idles at the end of the tree
> -			 * only if we processed at least one !rq_noidle request
> +			 * Idling is enabled for:
> +			 * - the last sync queue of a group
> +			 * - SYNC_WORKLOAD queues, for !rq_noidle requests
> +			 * - SYNC_NOIDLE_WORKLOAD "at the end of the tree"
> +			 *   if at least one queue sent !rq_noidle requests
> +			 *   not followed by at least one rq_noidle request.
>  			 */
> -			if (cfqd->serving_type == SYNC_WORKLOAD
> -			    || cfqd->noidle_tree_requires_idle
> +			if ((cfqd->serving_type == SYNC_WORKLOAD
> +			     && !rq_noidle(rq))
> +			    || (cfqd->serving_type == SYNC_NOIDLE_WORKLOAD
> +				&& cfqd->noidle_tree_requires_idle)
>  			    || cfqq->cfqg->nr_cfqq == 1)
>  				cfq_arm_slice_timer(cfqd);
>  		}
> -- 
> 1.6.4.4
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