linux-kernel - Re: IO request merging

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Message-ID: <5453B4DA.70802@kernel.dk>
Date:	Fri, 31 Oct 2014 10:12:10 -0600
From:	Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>
To:	Jan Kara <jack@...e.cz>
CC:	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: IO request merging

On 10/31/2014 02:30 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Thu 30-10-14 20:56:14, Jan Kara wrote:
>> On Thu 16-10-14 10:10:39, Jens Axboe wrote:
>>> On 10/16/2014 06:27 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
>>>>   Hello,
>>>>
>>>>   one of our customers was complaining that elv_attempt_insert_merge()
>>>> merges two requests (via blk_attempt_req_merge()) without asking IO
>>>> scheduler for permission (->elevator_allow_merge_fn() callback). Now for
>>>> them this is a problem because of their custom IO scheduler but looking
>>>> into the code this can result in somewhat suboptimal behavior for CFQ as
>>>> well (merging two requests from different IO contexts, possibly merging
>>>> sync & async request). What do others think about this?
>>>>
>>>> Regarding possible fix, we cannot really call ->elevator_allow_merge_fn()
>>>> because that assumes it is called from a context of a process submitting the
>>>> passed bio. So we would need to create a separate allow merge callback for
>>>> this.
>>   Sorry for a delayed reply, I was asking the customer for some more
>> details and it took them a while to get back to me...
>>
>>> It would need a new (rq to rq) merge hook, if they have a custom IO
>>> scheduler, they should submit a change to allow that kind of behaviour.
>>   OK, but since they would be the only ones using the hook, I don't think
>> upstream kernel would be that much interested in carrying it... That's why
>> I was asking whether CFQ wouldn't use the hook as well. But from what you
>> write below, I tend to agree that it would be an overkill for CFQ.
>>
>>> Outside of potentially mixing sync and async IO (which seems like
>>> something that should rarely/never happen), not sure I see a lot of
>>> downsides. And that case could be explicitly checked in attempt_merge()
>>> or blk_attempt_req_merge() without having to define a new hook to catch
>>> that specific case. For the hook, cfq would lookup the io contexts and
>>> compare, and basically disallow any merge that crosses a cfq io context
>>> boundary. But given that I would only expect these types of merges to
>>> happen very rarely, the sync vs async check would be good enough for me.
>>   Yeah. So what is a real problem for their custom scheduler is when two
>> requests with different IO priorities get merged (BTW, ioprio_best() has
>> a bug which they found and I just submitted a patch to fix it). For some
>> reason they don't want requests with different priorities merged (even if
>> resulting priority is computed properly). And we don't want checks like
>> this in generic code.
>   Thinking about it a bit more - is it really that beneficial to merge
> requests with different priorities? I wouldn't expect that to happen often
> enough to bring significant improvement in request sizes. Or do you have
> some usecase for that?

No it isn't, I would not expect it to happen often. Merges across
processes are fairly rare, and for the typical use cases, we don't do
different priority IO inside a single process. So it would not be a
complete loss to just eliminate merges of different priority IO.

That said, there's no really good reason to do it. An IO scheduler can
already forbid bio to request merging of different priorities, which
should be (by far) the most common merge type. If we want to catch the
last case of request to request merges, I would still prefer adding
something to catch that. That could either be an IO scheduler hook for
checking that, or it could be as simple as introducing that check in
attempt_merge(), if the queue is flagged as not wanting requests with
different io priorities merged. This is pretty much identical to how we
currently check merge flags in requests.

-- 
Jens Axboe

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