linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH V6 4/5] blk-mq-sched: improve dispatching from sw queue

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Date:   Thu, 12 Oct 2017 18:01:08 +0800
From:   Ming Lei <ming.lei@...hat.com>
To:     Omar Sandoval <osandov@...ndov.com>
Cc:     Jens Axboe <axboe@...com>, linux-block@...r.kernel.org,
        Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>,
        Mike Snitzer <snitzer@...hat.com>, dm-devel@...hat.com,
        Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@...disk.com>,
        Laurence Oberman <loberman@...hat.com>,
        Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@...aro.org>,
        Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@...alenko.name>,
        Tom Nguyen <tom81094@...il.com>, linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
        linux-scsi@...r.kernel.org, Omar Sandoval <osandov@...com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH V6 4/5] blk-mq-sched: improve dispatching from sw queue

On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:23:45AM -0700, Omar Sandoval wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 07:24:23PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> > SCSI devices use host-wide tagset, and the shared driver tag space is
> > often quite big. Meantime there is also queue depth for each lun(
> > .cmd_per_lun), which is often small, for example, on both lpfc and
> > qla2xxx, .cmd_per_lun is just 3.
> > 
> > So lots of requests may stay in sw queue, and we always flush all
> > belonging to same hw queue and dispatch them all to driver, unfortunately
> > it is easy to cause queue busy because of the small .cmd_per_lun.
> > Once these requests are flushed out, they have to stay in hctx->dispatch,
> > and no bio merge can participate into these requests, and sequential IO
> > performance is hurt a lot.
> > 
> > This patch introduces blk_mq_dequeue_from_ctx for dequeuing request from
> > sw queue so that we can dispatch them in scheduler's way, then we can
> > avoid to dequeue too many requests from sw queue when ->dispatch isn't
> > flushed completely.
> > 
> > This patch improves dispatching from sw queue when there is per-request-queue
> > queue depth by taking request one by one from sw queue, just like the way
> > of IO scheduler.
> 
> This still didn't address Jens' concern about using q->queue_depth as
> the heuristic for whether to do the full sw queue flush or one-by-one
> dispatch. The EWMA approach is a bit too complex for now, can you please
> try the heuristic of whether the driver ever returned BLK_STS_RESOURCE?

That can be done easily, but I am not sure if it is good.

For example, inside queue rq path of NVMe, kmalloc(GFP_ATOMIC) is
often used, if kmalloc() returns NULL just once, BLK_STS_RESOURCE
will be returned to blk-mq, then blk-mq will never do full sw
queue flush even when kmalloc() always succeed from that time
on.

Even EWMA approach isn't good on SCSI-MQ too, because
some SCSI's .cmd_per_lun is very small, such as 3 on
lpfc and qla2xxx, and one full flush will trigger
BLK_STS_RESOURCE easily.

So I suggest to use the way of q->queue_depth first, since we
don't get performance degrade report on other devices(!q->queue_depth)
with blk-mq. We can improve this way in the future if we
have better approach.

What do you think about it?


-- 
Ming