block, bfq: limit tags for writes and async I/O

Asynchronous I/O can easily starve synchronous I/O (both sync reads
and sync writes), by consuming all request tags. Similarly, storms of
synchronous writes, such as those that sync(2) may trigger, can starve
synchronous reads. In their turn, these two problems may also cause
BFQ to loose control on latency for interactive and soft real-time
applications. For example, on a PLEXTOR PX-256M5S SSD, LibreOffice
Writer takes 0.6 seconds to start if the device is idle, but it takes
more than 45 seconds (!) if there are sequential writes in the
background.

This commit addresses this issue by limiting the maximum percentage of
tags that asynchronous I/O requests and synchronous write requests can
consume. In particular, this commit grants a higher threshold to
synchronous writes, to prevent the latter from being starved by
asynchronous I/O.

According to the above test, LibreOffice Writer now starts in about
1.2 seconds on average, regardless of the background workload, and
apart from some rare outlier. To check this improvement, run, e.g.,
sudo ./comm_startup_lat.sh bfq 5 5 seq 10 "lowriter --terminate_after_init"
for the comm_startup_lat benchmark in the S suite [1].

[1] https://github.com/Algodev-github/S

Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Tested-by: Holger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/block/bfq-iosched.h b/block/bfq-iosched.h
index 5d47b58d5fc89..fcd941008127d 100644
--- a/block/bfq-iosched.h
+++ b/block/bfq-iosched.h
@@ -629,6 +629,18 @@ struct bfq_data {
 	struct bfq_io_cq *bio_bic;
 	/* bfqq associated with the task issuing current bio for merging */
 	struct bfq_queue *bio_bfqq;
+
+	/*
+	 * Cached sbitmap shift, used to compute depth limits in
+	 * bfq_update_depths.
+	 */
+	unsigned int sb_shift;
+
+	/*
+	 * Depth limits used in bfq_limit_depth (see comments on the
+	 * function)
+	 */
+	unsigned int word_depths[2][2];
 };
 
 enum bfqq_state_flags {