Commit Graph

4 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Paolo Valente 43c1b3d6e5 block, bfq: stress that low_latency must be off to get max throughput
The introduction of the BFQ and Kyber I/O schedulers has triggered a
new wave of I/O benchmarks. Unfortunately, comments and discussions on
these benchmarks confirm that there is still little awareness that it
is very hard to achieve, at the same time, a low latency and a high
throughput. In particular, virtually all benchmarks measure
throughput, or throughput-related figures of merit, but, for BFQ, they
use the scheduler in its default configuration. This configuration is
geared, instead, toward a low latency. This is evidently a sign that
BFQ documentation is still too unclear on this important aspect. This
commit addresses this issue by stressing how BFQ configuration must be
(easily) changed if the only goal is maximum throughput.

Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-05-10 07:39:43 -06:00
Paolo Valente 44e44a1b32 block, bfq: improve responsiveness
This patch introduces a simple heuristic to load applications quickly,
and to perform the I/O requested by interactive applications just as
quickly. To this purpose, both a newly-created queue and a queue
associated with an interactive application (we explain in a moment how
BFQ decides whether the associated application is interactive),
receive the following two special treatments:

1) The weight of the queue is raised.

2) The queue unconditionally enjoys device idling when it empties; in
fact, if the requests of a queue are sync, then performing device
idling for the queue is a necessary condition to guarantee that the
queue receives a fraction of the throughput proportional to its weight
(see [1] for details).

For brevity, we call just weight-raising the combination of these
two preferential treatments. For a newly-created queue,
weight-raising starts immediately and lasts for a time interval that:
1) depends on the device speed and type (rotational or
non-rotational), and 2) is equal to the time needed to load (start up)
a large-size application on that device, with cold caches and with no
additional workload.

Finally, as for guaranteeing a fast execution to interactive,
I/O-related tasks (such as opening a file), consider that any
interactive application blocks and waits for user input both after
starting up and after executing some task. After a while, the user may
trigger new operations, after which the application stops again, and
so on. Accordingly, the low-latency heuristic weight-raises again a
queue in case it becomes backlogged after being idle for a
sufficiently long (configurable) time. The weight-raising then lasts
for the same time as for a just-created queue.

According to our experiments, the combination of this low-latency
heuristic and of the improvements described in the previous patch
allows BFQ to guarantee a high application responsiveness.

[1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O
    Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System
    Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015.
    http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf

Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19 08:30:26 -06:00
Arianna Avanzini e21b7a0b98 block, bfq: add full hierarchical scheduling and cgroups support
Add complete support for full hierarchical scheduling, with a cgroups
interface. Full hierarchical scheduling is implemented through the
'entity' abstraction: both bfq_queues, i.e., the internal BFQ queues
associated with processes, and groups are represented in general by
entities. Given the bfq_queues associated with the processes belonging
to a given group, the entities representing these queues are sons of
the entity representing the group. At higher levels, if a group, say
G, contains other groups, then the entity representing G is the parent
entity of the entities representing the groups in G.

Hierarchical scheduling is performed as follows: if the timestamps of
a leaf entity (i.e., of a bfq_queue) change, and such a change lets
the entity become the next-to-serve entity for its parent entity, then
the timestamps of the parent entity are recomputed as a function of
the budget of its new next-to-serve leaf entity. If the parent entity
belongs, in its turn, to a group, and its new timestamps let it become
the next-to-serve for its parent entity, then the timestamps of the
latter parent entity are recomputed as well, and so on. When a new
bfq_queue must be set in service, the reverse path is followed: the
next-to-serve highest-level entity is chosen, then its next-to-serve
child entity, and so on, until the next-to-serve leaf entity is
reached, and the bfq_queue that this entity represents is set in
service.

Writeback is accounted for on a per-group basis, i.e., for each group,
the async I/O requests of the processes of the group are enqueued in a
distinct bfq_queue, and the entity associated with this queue is a
child of the entity associated with the group.

Weights can be assigned explicitly to groups and processes through the
cgroups interface, differently from what happens, for single
processes, if the cgroups interface is not used (as explained in the
description of the previous patch). In particular, since each node has
a full scheduler, each group can be assigned its own weight.

Signed-off-by: Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19 08:30:26 -06:00
Paolo Valente aee69d78de block, bfq: introduce the BFQ-v0 I/O scheduler as an extra scheduler
We tag as v0 the version of BFQ containing only BFQ's engine plus
hierarchical support. BFQ's engine is introduced by this commit, while
hierarchical support is added by next commit. We use the v0 tag to
distinguish this minimal version of BFQ from the versions containing
also the features and the improvements added by next commits. BFQ-v0
coincides with the version of BFQ submitted a few years ago [1], apart
from the introduction of preemption, described below.

BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, whose general structure,
plus a lot of code, are borrowed from CFQ.

- Each process doing I/O on a device is associated with a weight and a
  (bfq_)queue.

- BFQ grants exclusive access to the device, for a while, to one queue
  (process) at a time, and implements this service model by
  associating every queue with a budget, measured in number of
  sectors.

  - After a queue is granted access to the device, the budget of the
    queue is decremented, on each request dispatch, by the size of the
    request.

  - The in-service queue is expired, i.e., its service is suspended,
    only if one of the following events occurs: 1) the queue finishes
    its budget, 2) the queue empties, 3) a "budget timeout" fires.

    - The budget timeout prevents processes doing random I/O from
      holding the device for too long and dramatically reducing
      throughput.

    - Actually, as in CFQ, a queue associated with a process issuing
      sync requests may not be expired immediately when it empties. In
      contrast, BFQ may idle the device for a short time interval,
      giving the process the chance to go on being served if it issues
      a new request in time. Device idling typically boosts the
      throughput on rotational devices, if processes do synchronous
      and sequential I/O. In addition, under BFQ, device idling is
      also instrumental in guaranteeing the desired throughput
      fraction to processes issuing sync requests (see [2] for
      details).

      - With respect to idling for service guarantees, if several
        processes are competing for the device at the same time, but
        all processes (and groups, after the following commit) have
        the same weight, then BFQ guarantees the expected throughput
        distribution without ever idling the device. Throughput is
        thus as high as possible in this common scenario.

  - Queues are scheduled according to a variant of WF2Q+, named
    B-WF2Q+, and implemented using an augmented rb-tree to preserve an
    O(log N) overall complexity.  See [2] for more details. B-WF2Q+ is
    also ready for hierarchical scheduling. However, for a cleaner
    logical breakdown, the code that enables and completes
    hierarchical support is provided in the next commit, which focuses
    exactly on this feature.

  - B-WF2Q+ guarantees a tight deviation with respect to an ideal,
    perfectly fair, and smooth service. In particular, B-WF2Q+
    guarantees that each queue receives a fraction of the device
    throughput proportional to its weight, even if the throughput
    fluctuates, and regardless of: the device parameters, the current
    workload and the budgets assigned to the queue.

  - The last, budget-independence, property (although probably
    counterintuitive in the first place) is definitely beneficial, for
    the following reasons:

    - First, with any proportional-share scheduler, the maximum
      deviation with respect to an ideal service is proportional to
      the maximum budget (slice) assigned to queues. As a consequence,
      BFQ can keep this deviation tight not only because of the
      accurate service of B-WF2Q+, but also because BFQ *does not*
      need to assign a larger budget to a queue to let the queue
      receive a higher fraction of the device throughput.

    - Second, BFQ is free to choose, for every process (queue), the
      budget that best fits the needs of the process, or best
      leverages the I/O pattern of the process. In particular, BFQ
      updates queue budgets with a simple feedback-loop algorithm that
      allows a high throughput to be achieved, while still providing
      tight latency guarantees to time-sensitive applications. When
      the in-service queue expires, this algorithm computes the next
      budget of the queue so as to:

      - Let large budgets be eventually assigned to the queues
        associated with I/O-bound applications performing sequential
        I/O: in fact, the longer these applications are served once
        got access to the device, the higher the throughput is.

      - Let small budgets be eventually assigned to the queues
        associated with time-sensitive applications (which typically
        perform sporadic and short I/O), because, the smaller the
        budget assigned to a queue waiting for service is, the sooner
        B-WF2Q+ will serve that queue (Subsec 3.3 in [2]).

- Weights can be assigned to processes only indirectly, through I/O
  priorities, and according to the relation:
  weight = 10 * (IOPRIO_BE_NR - ioprio).
  The next patch provides, instead, a cgroups interface through which
  weights can be assigned explicitly.

- If several processes are competing for the device at the same time,
  but all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ
  guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling
  the device. It uses preemption instead. Throughput is then much
  higher in this common scenario.

- ioprio classes are served in strict priority order, i.e.,
  lower-priority queues are not served as long as there are
  higher-priority queues.  Among queues in the same class, the
  bandwidth is distributed in proportion to the weight of each
  queue. A very thin extra bandwidth is however guaranteed to the Idle
  class, to prevent it from starving.

- If the strict_guarantees parameter is set (default: unset), then BFQ
     - always performs idling when the in-service queue becomes empty;
     - forces the device to serve one I/O request at a time, by
       dispatching a new request only if there is no outstanding
       request.
  In the presence of differentiated weights or I/O-request sizes,
  both the above conditions are needed to guarantee that every
  queue receives its allotted share of the bandwidth (see
  Documentation/block/bfq-iosched.txt for more details). Setting
  strict_guarantees may evidently affect throughput.

[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/4/1/234
    https://lkml.org/lkml/2008/11/11/148

[2] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application
    Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of
    the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference
    (SYSTOR '12), June 2012.
    Slightly extended version:
    http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite-
							results.pdf

Signed-off-by: Fabio Checconi <fchecconi@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2017-04-19 08:29:02 -06:00