Message-ID: <20090506203228.GH8180@redhat.com>
Date:	Wed, 6 May 2009 16:32:28 -0400
From:	Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com>
To:	Andrew Morton <akpm@...ux-foundation.org>,
	Andrea Righi <righi.andrea@...il.com>
Cc:	nauman@...gle.com, dpshah@...gle.com, lizf@...fujitsu.com,
	mikew@...gle.com, fchecconi@...il.com, paolo.valente@...more.it,
	jens.axboe@...cle.com, ryov@...inux.co.jp, fernando@....ntt.co.jp,
	s-uchida@...jp.nec.com, taka@...inux.co.jp,
	guijianfeng@...fujitsu.com, jmoyer@...hat.com,
	dhaval@...ux.vnet.ibm.com, balbir@...ux.vnet.ibm.com,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	containers@...ts.linux-foundation.org, agk@...hat.com,
	dm-devel@...hat.com, snitzer@...hat.com, m-ikeda@...jp.nec.com,
	peterz@...radead.org
Subject: Re: IO scheduler based IO Controller V2

On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 10:33:32PM -0400, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> On Tue, May 05, 2009 at 01:24:41PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Tue,  5 May 2009 15:58:27 -0400
> > Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@...hat.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > > Hi All,
> > > 
> > > Here is the V2 of the IO controller patches generated on top of 2.6.30-rc4.
> > > ...
> > > Currently primarily two other IO controller proposals are out there.
> > > 
> > > dm-ioband
> > > ---------
> > > This patch set is from Ryo Tsuruta from valinux.
> > > ...
> > > IO-throttling
> > > -------------
> > > This patch set is from Andrea Righi provides max bandwidth controller.
> > 
> > I'm thinking we need to lock you guys in a room and come back in 15 minutes.
> > 
> > Seriously, how are we to resolve this?  We could lock me in a room and
> > cmoe back in 15 days, but there's no reason to believe that I'd emerge
> > with the best answer.
> > 
> > I tend to think that a cgroup-based controller is the way to go. 
> > Anything else will need to be wired up to cgroups _anyway_, and that
> > might end up messy.
> 
> Hi Andrew,
> 
> Sorry, did not get what do you mean by cgroup based controller? If you
> mean that we use cgroups for grouping tasks for controlling IO, then both
> IO scheduler based controller as well as io throttling proposal do that.
> dm-ioband also supports that up to some extent but it requires extra step of
> transferring cgroup grouping information to dm-ioband device using dm-tools.
> 
> But if you meant that io-throttle patches, then I think it solves only
> part of the problem and that is max bw control. It does not offer minimum
> BW/minimum disk share gurantees as offered by proportional BW control.
> 
> IOW, it supports upper limit control and does not support a work conserving
> IO controller which lets a group use the whole BW if competing groups are
> not present. IMHO, proportional BW control is an important feature which
> we will need and IIUC, io-throttle patches can't be easily extended to support
> proportional BW control, OTOH, one should be able to extend IO scheduler
> based proportional weight controller to also support max bw control. 
> 
> Andrea, last time you were planning to have a look at my patches and see
> if max bw controller can be implemented there. I got a feeling that it
> should not be too difficult to implement it there. We already have the
> hierarchical tree of io queues and groups in elevator layer and we run
> BFQ (WF2Q+) algorithm to select next queue to dispatch the IO from. It is
> just a matter of also keeping track of IO rate per queue/group and we should
> be easily be able to delay the dispatch of IO from a queue if its group has
> crossed the specified max bw.
> 
> This should lead to less code and reduced complextiy (compared with the
> case where we do max bw control with io-throttling patches and proportional
> BW control using IO scheduler based control patches).
>  
> So do you think that it would make sense to do max BW control along with
> proportional weight IO controller at IO scheduler? If yes, then we can
> work together and continue to develop this patchset to also support max
> bw control and meet your requirements and drop the io-throttling patches.
> 

Hi Andrea and others,

I always had this doubt in mind that any kind of 2nd level controller will
have no idea about underlying IO scheduler queues/semantics. So while it
can implement a particular cgroup policy (max bw like io-throttle or
proportional bw like dm-ioband) but there are high chances that it will
break IO scheduler's semantics in one way or other.

I had already sent out the results for dm-ioband in a separate thread.

http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg07258.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg07573.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg08177.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg08345.html
http://linux.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/Kernel/2009-04/msg08355.html

Here are some basic results with io-throttle. Andrea, please let me know
if you think this is procedural problem. Playing with io-throttle patches
for the first time.

I took V16 of your patches and trying it out with 2.6.30-rc4 with CFQ
scheduler.

I have got one SATA drive with one partition on it.

I am trying to create one cgroup and assignn 8MB/s limit to it and launch
on RT prio 0 task and one BE prio 7 task and see how this 8MB/s is divided
between these tasks. Following are the results.

Following is my test script.

*******************************************************************
#!/bin/bash

mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/sdb

mount -t cgroup -o blockio blockio /cgroup/iot/
mkdir -p /cgroup/iot/test1 /cgroup/iot/test2

# Set bw limit of 8 MB/ps on sdb
echo "/dev/sdb:$((8 * 1024 * 1024)):0:0" >
/cgroup/iot/test1/blockio.bandwidth-max

sync
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

echo $$ > /cgroup/iot/test1/tasks

# Launch a normal prio reader.
ionice -c 2 -n 7 dd if=/mnt/sdb/zerofile1 of=/dev/zero &
pid1=$!
echo $pid1

# Launch an RT reader  
ionice -c 1 -n 0 dd if=/mnt/sdb/zerofile2 of=/dev/zero &
pid2=$!
echo $pid2

wait $pid2
echo "RT task finished"
**********************************************************************

Test1
=====
Test two readers (one RT class and one BE class) and see how BW is
allocated with-in cgroup

With io-throttle patches
------------------------
- Two readers, first BE prio 7, second RT prio 0

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 55.8482 s, 4.2 MB/s
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 55.8975 s, 4.2 MB/s
RT task finished

Note: See, there is no difference in the performance of RT or BE task.
Looks like these got throttled equally.


Without io-throttle patches
----------------------------
- Two readers, first BE prio 7, second RT prio 0

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.81801 s, 83.1 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.28238 s, 44.3 MB/s

Note: Because I can't limit the BW without io-throttle patches, so don't
      worry about increased BW. But the important point is that RT task
      gets much more BW than a BE prio 7 task.

Test2
====
- Test 2 readers (One BE prio 0 and one BE prio 7) and see how BW is
distributed among these.

With io-throttle patches
------------------------
- Two readers, first BE prio 7, second BE prio 0

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 55.8604 s, 4.2 MB/s
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 55.8918 s, 4.2 MB/s
High prio reader finished

Without io-throttle patches
---------------------------
- Two readers, first BE prio 7, second BE prio 0

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 4.12074 s, 56.8 MB/s
High prio reader finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.36023 s, 43.7 MB/s

Note: There is no service differentiation between prio 0 and prio 7 task
      with io-throttle patches.

Test 3
======
- Run the one RT reader and one BE reader in root cgroup without any
  limitations. I guess this should mean unlimited BW and behavior should
  be same as with CFQ without io-throttling patches.

With io-throttle patches
=========================
Ran the test 4 times because I was getting different results in different
runs.

- Two readers, one RT prio 0  other BE prio 7

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.74604 s, 85.3 MB/s
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.20995 s, 44.9 MB/s
RT task finished

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 4.54417 s, 51.5 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.23396 s, 44.7 MB/s

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.17727 s, 45.2 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.25894 s, 44.5 MB/s

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.74141 s, 85.4 MB/s
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.20536 s, 45.0 MB/s
RT task finished

Note: Out of 4 runs, looks like twice it is complete priority inversion
      and RT task finished after BE task. Rest of the two times, the
      difference between BW of RT and BE task is much less as compared to
      without patches. In fact once it was almost same.

Without io-throttle patches.
===========================
- Two readers, one RT prio 0  other BE prio 7 (4 runs)

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.80988 s, 83.3 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.28228 s, 44.3 MB/s

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.80659 s, 83.4 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.27874 s, 44.4 MB/s

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.79601 s, 83.8 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.2542 s, 44.6 MB/s

234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 2.78764 s, 84.0 MB/s
RT task finished
234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.26009 s, 44.5 MB/s

Note, How consistent the behavior is without io-throttle patches.

In summary, I think a 2nd level solution can ensure one policy on cgroups but
it will break other semantics/properties of IO scheduler with-in cgroup as
2nd level solution has no idea at run time what is the IO scheduler running
underneath and what kind of properties it has.

Andrea, please try it on your setup and see if you get similar results
on or. Hopefully it is not a configuration or test procedure issue on my
side.

Thanks
Vivek

> The only thing which concerns me is the fact that IO scheduler does not
> have the view of higher level logical device. So if somebody has setup a
> software RAID and wants to put max BW limit on software raid device, this
> solution will not work. One shall have to live with max bw limits on 
> individual disks (where io scheduler is actually running). Do your patches
> allow to put limit on software RAID devices also? 
> 
> Ryo, dm-ioband breaks the notion of classes and priority of CFQ because
> of FIFO dispatch of buffered bios. Apart from that it tries to provide
> fairness in terms of actual IO done and that would mean a seeky workload
> will can use disk for much longer to get equivalent IO done and slow down
> other applications. Implementing IO controller at IO scheduler level gives
> us tigher control. Will it not meet your requirements? If you got specific
> concerns with IO scheduler based contol patches, please highlight these and
> we will see how these can be addressed.
> 
> Thanks
> Vivek
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