Re: [RFC PATCH] blk-mq: fixup RESTART when queue becomes idle

[Jens Axboe]

On 1/18/18 7:32 PM, Ming Lei wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 01:11:01PM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
>> On 1/18/18 11:47 AM, Bart Van Assche wrote:
>>>> This is all very tiresome.
>>>
>>> Yes, this is tiresome. It is very annoying to me that others keep
>>> introducing so many regressions in such important parts of the kernel.
>>> It is also annoying to me that I get blamed if I report a regression
>>> instead of seeing that the regression gets fixed.
>>
>> I agree, it sucks that any change there introduces the regression. I'm
>> fine with doing the delay insert again until a new patch is proven to be
>> better.
> 
> That way is still buggy as I explained, since rerun queue before adding
> request to hctx->dispatch_list isn't correct. Who can make sure the request
> is visible when __blk_mq_run_hw_queue() is called?

That race basically doesn't exist for a 10ms gap.

> Not mention this way will cause performance regression again.

How so? It's _exactly_ the same as what you are proposing, except mine
will potentially run the queue when it need not do so. But given that
these are random 10ms queue kicks because we are screwed, it should not
matter. The key point is that it only should be if we have NO better
options. If it's a frequently occurring event that we have to return
BLK_STS_RESOURCE, then we need to get a way to register an event for
when that condition clears. That event will then kick the necessary
queue(s).

>> From the original topic of this email, we have conditions that can cause
>> the driver to not be able to submit an IO. A set of those conditions can
>> only happen if IO is in flight, and those cases we have covered just
>> fine. Another set can potentially trigger without IO being in flight.
>> These are cases where a non-device resource is unavailable at the time
>> of submission. This might be iommu running out of space, for instance,
>> or it might be a memory allocation of some sort. For these cases, we
>> don't get any notification when the shortage clears. All we can do is
>> ensure that we restart operations at some point in the future. We're SOL
>> at that point, but we have to ensure that we make forward progress.
> 
> Right, it is a generic issue, not DM-specific one, almost all drivers
> call kmalloc(GFP_ATOMIC) in IO path.

GFP_ATOMIC basically never fails, unless we are out of memory. The
exception is higher order allocations. If a driver has a higher order
atomic allocation in its IO path, the device driver writer needs to be
taken out behind the barn and shot. Simple as that. It will NEVER work
well in a production environment. Witness the disaster that so many NIC
driver writers have learned.

This is NOT the case we care about here. It's resources that are more
readily depleted because other devices are using them. If it's a high
frequency or generally occurring event, then we simply must have a
callback to restart the queue from that. The condition then becomes
identical to device private starvation, the only difference being from
where we restart the queue.

> IMO, there is enough time for figuring out a generic solution before
> 4.16 release.

I would hope so, but the proposed solutions have not filled me with
a lot of confidence in the end result so far.

>> That last set of conditions better not be a a common occurence, since
>> performance is down the toilet at that point. I don't want to introduce
>> hot path code to rectify it. Have the driver return if that happens in a
>> way that is DIFFERENT from needing a normal restart. The driver knows if
>> this is a resource that will become available when IO completes on this
>> device or not. If we get that return, we have a generic run-again delay.
> 
> Now most of times both NVMe and SCSI won't return BLK_STS_RESOURCE, and
> it should be DM-only which returns STS_RESOURCE so often.

Where does the dm STS_RESOURCE error usually come from - what's exact
resource are we running out of?

-- 
Jens Axboe