Re: [PATCH] virtio_blk: set the default scheduler to none

[Paolo Bonzini]

On Thu, Dec 7, 2023 at 3:52 PM Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Dec 07, 2023 at 12:31:05PM +0800, Li Feng wrote:
> > virtio-blk is generally used in cloud computing scenarios, where the
> > performance of virtual disks is very important. The mq-deadline scheduler
> > has a big performance drop compared to none with single queue. In my tests,
> > mq-deadline 4k readread iops were 270k compared to 450k for none. So here
> > the default scheduler of virtio-blk is set to "none".
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Li Feng <fengli@xxxxxxxxxx>
> > ---
> >  drivers/block/virtio_blk.c | 2 +-
> >  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)
>
> This seems similar to commit f8b12e513b95 ("virtio_blk: revert
> QUEUE_FLAG_VIRT addition") where changing the default sounded good in
> theory but exposed existing users to performance regressions. [...]
> I don't want to be overly conservative. The virtio_blk driver has
> undergone changes in this regard from the legacy block layer to blk-mq
> (without an I/O scheduler) to blk-mq (mq-deadline).

IIRC there were also regressions in both virtio-blk and virtio-scsi
when switching from the legacy block layer to blk-mq. So perhaps I
*am* a bit more conservative, but based on past experience, this patch
seems not to be a great idea for practical use cases.

Paolo

> Performance changed
> at each step and that wasn't a showstopper, so I think we could default
> to 'none' without a lot of damage. Let's just get more data.
>
> Stefan
>
> >
> > diff --git a/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c b/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > index d53d6aa8ee69..5183ec8e00be 100644
> > --- a/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > +++ b/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
> > @@ -1367,7 +1367,7 @@ static int virtblk_probe(struct virtio_device *vdev)
> >       vblk->tag_set.ops = &virtio_mq_ops;
> >       vblk->tag_set.queue_depth = queue_depth;
> >       vblk->tag_set.numa_node = NUMA_NO_NODE;
> > -     vblk->tag_set.flags = BLK_MQ_F_SHOULD_MERGE;
> > +     vblk->tag_set.flags = BLK_MQ_F_SHOULD_MERGE | BLK_MQ_F_NO_SCHED_BY_DEFAULT;
> >       vblk->tag_set.cmd_size =
> >               sizeof(struct virtblk_req) +
> >               sizeof(struct scatterlist) * VIRTIO_BLK_INLINE_SG_CNT;
> > --
> > 2.42.0
> >