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authorPaolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>2017-04-12 18:23:12 +0200
committerJens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>2017-04-19 08:30:26 -0600
commit44e44a1b329ed37a98bc41ab21fb6897d5a922ac (patch)
treeb98a87130dddbba1fa3b7a755ea77998d4841ee1 /Documentation/block
parentc074170e65995706be78e8c57ed2017c638d5464 (diff)
block, bfq: improve responsiveness
This patch introduces a simple heuristic to load applications quickly, and to perform the I/O requested by interactive applications just as quickly. To this purpose, both a newly-created queue and a queue associated with an interactive application (we explain in a moment how BFQ decides whether the associated application is interactive), receive the following two special treatments: 1) The weight of the queue is raised. 2) The queue unconditionally enjoys device idling when it empties; in fact, if the requests of a queue are sync, then performing device idling for the queue is a necessary condition to guarantee that the queue receives a fraction of the throughput proportional to its weight (see [1] for details). For brevity, we call just weight-raising the combination of these two preferential treatments. For a newly-created queue, weight-raising starts immediately and lasts for a time interval that: 1) depends on the device speed and type (rotational or non-rotational), and 2) is equal to the time needed to load (start up) a large-size application on that device, with cold caches and with no additional workload. Finally, as for guaranteeing a fast execution to interactive, I/O-related tasks (such as opening a file), consider that any interactive application blocks and waits for user input both after starting up and after executing some task. After a while, the user may trigger new operations, after which the application stops again, and so on. Accordingly, the low-latency heuristic weight-raises again a queue in case it becomes backlogged after being idle for a sufficiently long (configurable) time. The weight-raising then lasts for the same time as for a just-created queue. According to our experiments, the combination of this low-latency heuristic and of the improvements described in the previous patch allows BFQ to guarantee a high application responsiveness. [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org> Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/block')
-rw-r--r--Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt9
1 files changed, 9 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt b/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt
index 461b27fce979..1b87df6cd476 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt
@@ -375,6 +375,11 @@ default, low latency mode is enabled. If enabled, interactive and soft
real-time applications are privileged and experience a lower latency,
as explained in more detail in the description of how BFQ works.
+DO NOT enable this mode if you need full control on bandwidth
+distribution. In fact, if it is enabled, then BFQ automatically
+increases the bandwidth share of privileged applications, as the main
+means to guarantee a lower latency to them.
+
timeout_sync
------------
@@ -507,6 +512,10 @@ linear mapping between ioprio and weights, described at the beginning
of the tunable section, is still valid, but all weights higher than
IOPRIO_BE_NR*10 are mapped to ioprio 0.
+Recall that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the
+weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time
+applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights.
+
[1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O
Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System