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![Paolo Valente](/assets/img/avatar_default.png)
We tag as v0 the version of BFQ containing only BFQ's engine plus hierarchical support. BFQ's engine is introduced by this commit, while hierarchical support is added by next commit. We use the v0 tag to distinguish this minimal version of BFQ from the versions containing also the features and the improvements added by next commits. BFQ-v0 coincides with the version of BFQ submitted a few years ago [1], apart from the introduction of preemption, described below. BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, whose general structure, plus a lot of code, are borrowed from CFQ. - Each process doing I/O on a device is associated with a weight and a (bfq_)queue. - BFQ grants exclusive access to the device, for a while, to one queue (process) at a time, and implements this service model by associating every queue with a budget, measured in number of sectors. - After a queue is granted access to the device, the budget of the queue is decremented, on each request dispatch, by the size of the request. - The in-service queue is expired, i.e., its service is suspended, only if one of the following events occurs: 1) the queue finishes its budget, 2) the queue empties, 3) a "budget timeout" fires. - The budget timeout prevents processes doing random I/O from holding the device for too long and dramatically reducing throughput. - Actually, as in CFQ, a queue associated with a process issuing sync requests may not be expired immediately when it empties. In contrast, BFQ may idle the device for a short time interval, giving the process the chance to go on being served if it issues a new request in time. Device idling typically boosts the throughput on rotational devices, if processes do synchronous and sequential I/O. In addition, under BFQ, device idling is also instrumental in guaranteeing the desired throughput fraction to processes issuing sync requests (see [2] for details). - With respect to idling for service guarantees, if several processes are competing for the device at the same time, but all processes (and groups, after the following commit) have the same weight, then BFQ guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling the device. Throughput is thus as high as possible in this common scenario. - Queues are scheduled according to a variant of WF2Q+, named B-WF2Q+, and implemented using an augmented rb-tree to preserve an O(log N) overall complexity. See [2] for more details. B-WF2Q+ is also ready for hierarchical scheduling. However, for a cleaner logical breakdown, the code that enables and completes hierarchical support is provided in the next commit, which focuses exactly on this feature. - B-WF2Q+ guarantees a tight deviation with respect to an ideal, perfectly fair, and smooth service. In particular, B-WF2Q+ guarantees that each queue receives a fraction of the device throughput proportional to its weight, even if the throughput fluctuates, and regardless of: the device parameters, the current workload and the budgets assigned to the queue. - The last, budget-independence, property (although probably counterintuitive in the first place) is definitely beneficial, for the following reasons: - First, with any proportional-share scheduler, the maximum deviation with respect to an ideal service is proportional to the maximum budget (slice) assigned to queues. As a consequence, BFQ can keep this deviation tight not only because of the accurate service of B-WF2Q+, but also because BFQ *does not* need to assign a larger budget to a queue to let the queue receive a higher fraction of the device throughput. - Second, BFQ is free to choose, for every process (queue), the budget that best fits the needs of the process, or best leverages the I/O pattern of the process. In particular, BFQ updates queue budgets with a simple feedback-loop algorithm that allows a high throughput to be achieved, while still providing tight latency guarantees to time-sensitive applications. When the in-service queue expires, this algorithm computes the next budget of the queue so as to: - Let large budgets be eventually assigned to the queues associated with I/O-bound applications performing sequential I/O: in fact, the longer these applications are served once got access to the device, the higher the throughput is. - Let small budgets be eventually assigned to the queues associated with time-sensitive applications (which typically perform sporadic and short I/O), because, the smaller the budget assigned to a queue waiting for service is, the sooner B-WF2Q+ will serve that queue (Subsec 3.3 in [2]). - Weights can be assigned to processes only indirectly, through I/O priorities, and according to the relation: weight = 10 * (IOPRIO_BE_NR - ioprio). The next patch provides, instead, a cgroups interface through which weights can be assigned explicitly. - If several processes are competing for the device at the same time, but all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling the device. It uses preemption instead. Throughput is then much higher in this common scenario. - ioprio classes are served in strict priority order, i.e., lower-priority queues are not served as long as there are higher-priority queues. Among queues in the same class, the bandwidth is distributed in proportion to the weight of each queue. A very thin extra bandwidth is however guaranteed to the Idle class, to prevent it from starving. - If the strict_guarantees parameter is set (default: unset), then BFQ - always performs idling when the in-service queue becomes empty; - forces the device to serve one I/O request at a time, by dispatching a new request only if there is no outstanding request. In the presence of differentiated weights or I/O-request sizes, both the above conditions are needed to guarantee that every queue receives its allotted share of the bandwidth (see Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt for more details). Setting strict_guarantees may evidently affect throughput. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/1/234 https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/11/148 [2] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. Slightly extended version: http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- results.pdf Signed-off-by: Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@gmail.com> 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>
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983 B
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34 lines
983 B
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00-INDEX
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- This file
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bfq-iosched.txt
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- BFQ IO scheduler and its tunables
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biodoc.txt
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- Notes on the Generic Block Layer Rewrite in Linux 2.5
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biovecs.txt
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- Immutable biovecs and biovec iterators
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capability.txt
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- Generic Block Device Capability (/sys/block/<device>/capability)
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cfq-iosched.txt
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- CFQ IO scheduler tunables
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cmdline-partition.txt
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- how to specify block device partitions on kernel command line
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data-integrity.txt
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- Block data integrity
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deadline-iosched.txt
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- Deadline IO scheduler tunables
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ioprio.txt
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- Block io priorities (in CFQ scheduler)
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pr.txt
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- Block layer support for Persistent Reservations
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null_blk.txt
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- Null block for block-layer benchmarking.
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queue-sysfs.txt
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- Queue's sysfs entries
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request.txt
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- The members of struct request (in include/linux/blkdev.h)
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stat.txt
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- Block layer statistics in /sys/block/<device>/stat
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switching-sched.txt
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- Switching I/O schedulers at runtime
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writeback_cache_control.txt
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- Control of volatile write back caches
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