block: hook up writeback throttling

Enable throttling of buffered writeback to make it a lot
more smooth, and has way less impact on other system activity.
Background writeback should be, by definition, background
activity. The fact that we flush huge bundles of it at the time
means that it potentially has heavy impacts on foreground workloads,
which isn't ideal. We can't easily limit the sizes of writes that
we do, since that would impact file system layout in the presence
of delayed allocation. So just throttle back buffered writeback,
unless someone is waiting for it.

The algorithm for when to throttle takes its inspiration in the
CoDel networking scheduling algorithm. Like CoDel, blk-wb monitors
the minimum latencies of requests over a window of time. In that
window of time, if the minimum latency of any request exceeds a
given target, then a scale count is incremented and the queue depth
is shrunk. The next monitoring window is shrunk accordingly. Unlike
CoDel, if we hit a window that exhibits good behavior, then we
simply increment the scale count and re-calculate the limits for that
scale value. This prevents us from oscillating between a
close-to-ideal value and max all the time, instead remaining in the
windows where we get good behavior.

Unlike CoDel, blk-wb allows the scale count to to negative. This
happens if we primarily have writes going on. Unlike positive
scale counts, this doesn't change the size of the monitoring window.
When the heavy writers finish, blk-bw quickly snaps back to it's
stable state of a zero scale count.

The patch registers a sysfs entry, 'wb_lat_usec'. This sets the latency
target to me met. It defaults to 2 msec for non-rotational storage, and
75 msec for rotational storage. Setting this value to '0' disables
blk-wb. Generally, a user would not have to touch this setting.

We don't enable WBT on devices that are managed with CFQ, and have
a non-root block cgroup attached. If we have a proportional share setup
on this particular disk, then the wbt throttling will interfere with
that. We don't have a strong need for wbt for that case, since we will
rely on CFQ doing that for us.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>

1 files changed, 7 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
index 2a3904030dea..87abf1ac2939 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
@@ -169,5 +169,12 @@ This is the number of bytes the device can write in a single write-same
 command.  A value of '0' means write-same is not supported by this
 device.
 
+wb_lat_usec (RW)
+----------------
+If the device is registered for writeback throttling, then this file shows
+the target minimum read latency. If this latency is exceeded in a given
+window of time (see wb_window_usec), then the writeback throttling will start
+scaling back writes.
+
 
 Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>, February 2009