bfq defines as asymmetric a scenario where an active entity, say E
(representing either a single bfq_queue or a group of other entities),
has a higher weight than some other entities. If the entity E does sync
I/O in such a scenario, then bfq plugs the dispatch of the I/O of the
other entities in the following situation: E is in service but
temporarily has no pending I/O request. In fact, without this plugging,
all the times that E stops being temporarily idle, it may find the
internal queues of the storage device already filled with an
out-of-control number of extra requests, from other entities. So E may
have to wait for the service of these extra requests, before finally
having its own requests served. This may easily break service
guarantees, with E getting less than its fair share of the device
throughput. Usually, the end result is that E gets the same fraction of
the throughput as the other entities, instead of getting more, according
to its higher weight.
Yet there are two other more subtle cases where E, even if its weight is
actually equal to or even lower than the weight of any other active
entities, may get less than its fair share of the throughput in case the
above I/O plugging is not performed:
1. other entities issue larger requests than E;
2. other entities contain more active child entities than E (or in
general tend to have more backlog than E).
In the first case, other entities may get more service than E because
they get larger requests, than those of E, served during the temporary
idle periods of E. In the second case, other entities get more service
because, by having many child entities, they have many requests ready
for dispatching while E is temporarily idle.
This commit addresses this issue by extending the definition of
asymmetric scenario: a scenario is asymmetric when
- active entities representing bfq_queues have differentiated weights,
as in the original definition
or (inclusive)
- one or more entities representing groups of entities are active.
This broader definition makes sure that I/O plugging will be performed
in all the above cases, provided that there is at least one active
group. Of course, this definition is very coarse, so it will trigger
I/O plugging also in cases where it is not needed, such as, e.g.,
multiple active entities with just one child each, and all with the same
I/O-request size. The reason for this coarse definition is just that a
finer-grained definition would be rather heavy to compute.
On the opposite end, even this new definition does not trigger I/O
plugging in all cases where there is no active group, and all bfq_queues
have the same weight. So, in these cases some unfairness may occur if
there are asymmetries in I/O-request sizes. We made this choice because
I/O plugging may lower throughput, and probably a user that has not
created any group cares more about throughput than about perfect
fairness. At any rate, as for possible applications that may care about
service guarantees, bfq already guarantees a high responsiveness and a
low latency to soft real-time applications automatically.
Signed-off-by: Federico Motta <federico@willer.it>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2d29c9f89f