bcd5642607
I/O schedulers typically allow NCQ-capable drives to prefetch I/O
requests, as NCQ boosts the throughput exactly by prefetching and
internally reordering requests.
Unfortunately, as discussed in detail and shown experimentally in [1],
this may cause fairness and latency guarantees to be violated. The
main problem is that the internal scheduler of an NCQ-capable drive
may postpone the service of some unlucky (prefetched) requests as long
as it deems serving other requests more appropriate to boost the
throughput.
This patch addresses this issue by not disabling device idling for
weight-raised queues, even if the device supports NCQ. This allows BFQ
to start serving a new queue, and therefore allows the drive to
prefetch new requests, only after the idling timeout expires. At that
time, all the outstanding requests of the expired queue have been most
certainly served.
[1] 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: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.