Date:   Wed, 19 Apr 2017 09:08:02 +0200
From:   Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@...aro.org>
To:     Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org>
Cc:     Jens Axboe <axboe@...nel.dk>, Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@...il.com>,
        Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@...il.com>,
        linux-block@...r.kernel.org,
        Linux-Kernal <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
        Ulf Hansson <ulf.hansson@...aro.org>,
        Linus Walleij <linus.walleij@...aro.org>, broonie@...nel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH V3 02/16] block, bfq: add full hierarchical scheduling and cgroups support


> Il giorno 19 apr 2017, alle ore 07:33, Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@...aro.org> ha scritto:
> 
>> 
>> Il giorno 18 apr 2017, alle ore 09:04, Tejun Heo <tj@...nel.org> ha scritto:
>> 
>> Hello, Paolo.
>> 
>> On Wed, Apr 12, 2017 at 07:22:03AM +0200, Paolo Valente wrote:
>>> could you elaborate a bit more on this?  I mean, cgroups support has
>>> been in BFQ (and CFQ) for almost ten years, perfectly working as far
>>> as I know.  Of course it is perfectly working in terms of I/O and not
>>> of CPU bandwidth distribution; and, for the moment, it is effective
>>> only for devices below 30-50KIOPS.  What's the point in throwing
>>> (momentarily?) away such a fundamental feature?  What am I missing?
>> 
>> I've been trying to track down latency issues with the CPU controller
>> which basically takes the same approach and I'm not sure nesting
>> scheduler timelines is a good approach.  It intuitively feels elegant
>> but seems to have some fundamental issues.  IIUC, bfq isn't quite the
>> same in that it doesn't need load balancer across multiple queues and
>> it could be that bfq is close enough to the basic model that the
>> nested behavior maps to the correct scheduling behavior.
>> 
>> However, for example, in the CPU controller, the nested timelines
>> break sleeper boost.  The boost is implemented by considering the
>> thread to have woken up upto some duration prior to the current time;
>> however, it only affects the timeline inside the cgroup and there's no
>> good way to propagate it upwards.  The final result is two threads in
>> a cgroup with the double weight can behave significantly worse in
>> terms of latency compared to two threads with the weight of 1 in the
>> root.
>> 
> 
> Hi Tejun,
> I don't know in detail the specific multiple-queue issues you report,
> but bfq implements the upward propagation you mention: if a process in
> a group is to be privileged, i.e., if the process has basically to be
> provided with a higher weight (in addition to other important forms of
> help), then this weight boost is propagated upward through the path
> from the process to the root node in the group hierarchy.
> 

ERRATA CORRIGE: actually, this propagation is implemented in a simple
variant of bfq that I made for a virtualization company (to truly
guarantee a low latency to the processes in a guest OS, regardless of
the load in the host).  The base version of bfq in these patches
contains all the mechanisms needed to get this propagation, but
doesn't modify group weights autonomously.

Paolo

>> Given that the nested scheduling ends up pretty expensive, I'm not
>> sure how good a model this nesting approach is.  Especially if there
>> can be multiple queues, the weight distribution across cgroup
>> instances across multiple queues has to be coordinated globally
>> anyway,
> 
> To get perfect global service guarantees, yes.  But you can settle
> with tradeoffs that, according to my experience with storage and
> packet I/O, are so good to be probably indistinguishable from an
> ideal, but too costly solution.  I mean, with a well-done approximated
> scheduling solution, the deviation with respect to an ideal service
> can be in the same order of the noise caused by unavoidable latencies
> of other sw and hw components than the scheduler.
> 
>> so the weight / cost adjustment part can't happen
>> automatically anyway as in single queue case.  If we're going there,
>> we might as well implement cgroup support by actively modulating the
>> combined weights, which will make individual scheduling operations
>> cheaper and it easier to think about and guarantee latency behaviors.
>> 
> 
> Yes.  Anyway, I didn't quite understand what is or could be the
> alternative, w.r.t. hierarchical scheduling, for guaranteeing
> bandwidth distribution of shared resources in a complex setting.  If
> you think I could be of any help on this, just put me somehow in the
> loop.
> 
>> If you think that bfq will stay single queue and won't need timeline
>> modifying heuristics (for responsiveness or whatever), the current
>> approach could be fine, but I'm a bit awry about committing to the
>> current approach if we're gonna encounter the same problems.
>> 
> 
> As of now, bfq is targeted at not too fast devices (< 30-50KIOPS),
> which happen to be single queue.  In particular, bfq is currently
> agnostic w.r.t.  to the number of downstream queues.
> 
> Thanks,
> Paolo
> 
>> Thanks.
>> 
>> -- 
>> tejun

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