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To guarantee a low latency also to the I/O requests issued by soft
real-time applications, this patch introduces a further heuristic,
which weight-raises (in the sense explained in the previous patch)
also the queues associated to applications deemed as soft real-time.
To be deemed as soft real-time, an application must meet two
requirements. First, the application must not require an average
bandwidth higher than the approximate bandwidth required to playback
or record a compressed high-definition video. Second, the request
pattern of the application must be isochronous, i.e., after issuing a
request or a batch of requests, the application must stop issuing new
requests until all its pending requests have been completed. After
that, the application may issue a new batch, and so on.
As for the second requirement, it is critical to require also that,
after all the pending requests of the application have been completed,
an adequate minimum amount of time elapses before the application
starts issuing new requests. This prevents also greedy (i.e.,
I/O-bound) applications from being incorrectly deemed, occasionally,
as soft real-time. In fact, if *any amount of time* is fine, then even
a greedy application may, paradoxically, meet both the above
requirements, if: (1) the application performs random I/O and/or the
device is slow, and (2) the CPU load is high. The reason is the
following. First, if condition (1) is true, then, during the service
of the application, the throughput may be low enough to let the
application meet the bandwidth requirement. Second, if condition (2)
is true as well, then the application may occasionally behave in an
apparently isochronous way, because it may simply stop issuing
requests while the CPUs are busy serving other processes.
To address this issue, the heuristic leverages the simple fact that
greedy applications issue *all* their requests as quickly as they can,
whereas soft real-time applications spend some time processing data
after each batch of requests is completed. In particular, the
heuristic works as follows. First, according to the above isochrony
requirement, the heuristic checks whether an application may be soft
real-time, thereby giving to the application the opportunity to be
deemed as such, only when both the following two conditions happen to
hold: 1) the queue associated with the application has expired and is
empty, 2) there is no outstanding request of the application.
Suppose that both conditions hold at time, say, t_c and that the
application issues its next request at time, say, t_i. At time t_c the
heuristic computes the next time instant, called soft_rt_next_start in
the code, such that, only if t_i >= soft_rt_next_start, then both the
next conditions will hold when the application issues its next
request: 1) the application will meet the above bandwidth requirement,
2) a given minimum time interval, say Delta, will have elapsed from
time t_c (so as to filter out greedy application).
The current value of Delta is a little bit higher than the value that
we have found, experimentally, to be adequate on a real,
general-purpose machine. In particular we had to increase Delta to
make the filter quite precise also in slower, embedded systems, and in
KVM/QEMU virtual machines (details in the comments on the code).
If the application actually issues its next request after time
soft_rt_next_start, then its associated queue will be weight-raised
for a relatively short time interval. If, during this time interval,
the application proves again to meet the bandwidth and isochrony
requirements, then the end of the weight-raising period for the queue
is moved forward, and so on. Note that an application whose associated
queue never happens to be empty when it expires will never have the
opportunity to be deemed as soft real-time.
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>
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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>
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This patch deals with two sources of unfairness, which can also cause
high latencies and throughput loss. The first source is related to
write requests. Write requests tend to starve read requests, basically
because, on one side, writes are slower than reads, whereas, on the
other side, storage devices confuse schedulers by deceptively
signaling the completion of write requests immediately after receiving
them. This patch addresses this issue by just throttling writes. In
particular, after a write request is dispatched for a queue, the
budget of the queue is decremented by the number of sectors to write,
multiplied by an (over)charge coefficient. The value of the
coefficient is the result of our tuning with different devices.
The second source of unfairness has to do with slowness detection:
when the in-service queue is expired, BFQ also controls whether the
queue has been "too slow", i.e., has consumed its last-assigned budget
at such a low rate that it would have been impossible to consume all
of this budget within the maximum time slice T_max (Subsec. 3.5 in
[1]). In this case, the queue is always (over)charged the whole
budget, to reduce its utilization of the device. Both this overcharge
and the slowness-detection criterion may cause unfairness.
First, always charging a full budget to a slow queue is too coarse. It
is much more accurate, and this patch lets BFQ do so, to charge an
amount of service 'equivalent' to the amount of time during which the
queue has been in service. As explained in more detail in the comments
on the code, this enables BFQ to provide time fairness among slow
queues.
Secondly, because of ZBR, a queue may be deemed as slow when its
associated process is performing I/O on the slowest zones of a
disk. However, unless the process is truly too slow, not reducing the
disk utilization of the queue is more profitable in terms of disk
throughput than the opposite. A similar problem is caused by logical
block mapping on non-rotational devices. For this reason, this patch
lets a queue be charged time, and not budget, only if the queue has
consumed less than 2/3 of its assigned budget. As an additional,
important benefit, this tolerance allows BFQ to preserve enough
elasticity to still perform bandwidth, and not time, distribution with
little unlucky or quasi-sequential processes.
Finally, for the same reasons as above, this patch makes slowness
detection itself much less harsh: a queue is deemed slow only if it
has consumed its budget at less than half of the peak rate.
[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>
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Unless the maximum budget B_max that BFQ can assign to a queue is set
explicitly by the user, BFQ automatically updates B_max. In
particular, BFQ dynamically sets B_max to the number of sectors that
can be read, at the current estimated peak rate, during the maximum
time, T_max, allowed before a budget timeout occurs. In formulas, if
we denote as R_est the estimated peak rate, then B_max = T_max ∗
R_est. Hence, the higher R_est is with respect to the actual device
peak rate, the higher the probability that processes incur budget
timeouts unjustly is. Besides, a too high value of B_max unnecessarily
increases the deviation from an ideal, smooth service.
Unfortunately, it is not trivial to estimate the peak rate correctly:
because of the presence of sw and hw queues between the scheduler and
the device components that finally serve I/O requests, it is hard to
say exactly when a given dispatched request is served inside the
device, and for how long. As a consequence, it is hard to know
precisely at what rate a given set of requests is actually served by
the device.
On the opposite end, the dispatch time of any request is trivially
available, and, from this piece of information, the "dispatch rate"
of requests can be immediately computed. So, the idea in the next
function is to use what is known, namely request dispatch times
(plus, when useful, request completion times), to estimate what is
unknown, namely in-device request service rate.
The main issue is that, because of the above facts, the rate at
which a certain set of requests is dispatched over a certain time
interval can vary greatly with respect to the rate at which the
same requests are then served. But, since the size of any
intermediate queue is limited, and the service scheme is lossless
(no request is silently dropped), the following obvious convergence
property holds: the number of requests dispatched MUST become
closer and closer to the number of requests completed as the
observation interval grows. This is the key property used in
this new version of the peak-rate estimator.
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>
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The feedback-loop algorithm used by BFQ to compute queue (process)
budgets is basically a set of three update rules, one for each of the
main reasons why a queue may be expired. If many processes suddenly
switch from sporadic I/O to greedy and sequential I/O, then these
rules are quite slow to assign large budgets to these processes, and
hence to achieve a high throughput. On the opposite side, BFQ assigns
the maximum possible budget B_max to a just-created queue. This allows
a high throughput to be achieved immediately if the associated process
is I/O-bound and performs sequential I/O from the beginning. But it
also increases the worst-case latency experienced by the first
requests issued by the process, because the larger the budget of a
queue waiting for service is, the later the queue will be served by
B-WF2Q+ (Subsec 3.3 in [1]). This is detrimental for an interactive or
soft real-time application.
To tackle these throughput and latency problems, on one hand this
patch changes the initial budget value to B_max/2. On the other hand,
it re-tunes the three rules, adopting a more aggressive,
multiplicative increase/linear decrease scheme. This scheme trades
latency for throughput more than before, and tends to assign large
budgets quickly to processes that are or become I/O-bound. For two of
the expiration reasons, the new version of the rules also contains
some more little improvements, briefly described below.
*No more backlog.* In this case, the budget was larger than the number
of sectors actually read/written by the process before it stopped
doing I/O. Hence, to reduce latency for the possible future I/O
requests of the process, the old rule simply set the next budget to
the number of sectors actually consumed by the process. However, if
there are still outstanding requests, then the process may have not
yet issued its next request just because it is still waiting for the
completion of some of the still outstanding ones. If this sub-case
holds true, then the new rule, instead of decreasing the budget,
doubles it, proactively, in the hope that: 1) a larger budget will fit
the actual needs of the process, and 2) the process is sequential and
hence a higher throughput will be achieved by serving the process
longer after granting it access to the device.
*Budget timeout*. The original rule set the new budget to the maximum
value B_max, to maximize throughput and let all processes experiencing
budget timeouts receive the same share of the device time. In our
experiments we verified that this sudden jump to B_max did not provide
sensible benefits; rather it increased the latency of processes
performing sporadic and short I/O. The new rule only doubles the
budget.
[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>
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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>
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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>
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