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| author | Paolo Valente <[email protected]> | 2017-09-21 11:04:00 +0200 |
|---|---|---|
| committer | Jens Axboe <[email protected]> | 2017-10-03 08:40:54 -0600 |
| commit | 4baa8bb13f41307f3eb62fe91f93a1a798ebef53 (patch) | |
| tree | 499e78fa5e8deb43e51b52f21d180e8021d4aad8 /tools/perf/scripts/python/event_analyzing_sample.py | |
| parent | aac8d41cd438f25bf3110fc6b98f1d16d7dbc169 (diff) | |
block, bfq: fix wrong init of saved start time for weight raising
This commit fixes a bug that causes bfq to fail to guarantee a high
responsiveness on some drives, if there is heavy random read+write I/O
in the background. More precisely, such a failure allowed this bug to
be found [1], but the bug may well cause other yet unreported
anomalies.
BFQ raises the weight of the bfq_queues associated with soft real-time
applications, to privilege the I/O, and thus reduce latency, for these
applications. This mechanism is named soft-real-time weight raising in
BFQ. A soft real-time period may happen to be nested into an
interactive weight raising period, i.e., it may happen that, when a
bfq_queue switches to a soft real-time weight-raised state, the
bfq_queue is already being weight-raised because deemed interactive
too. In this case, BFQ saves in a special variable
wr_start_at_switch_to_srt, the time instant when the interactive
weight-raising period started for the bfq_queue, i.e., the time
instant when BFQ started to deem the bfq_queue interactive. This value
is then used to check whether the interactive weight-raising period
would still be in progress when the soft real-time weight-raising
period ends. If so, interactive weight raising is restored for the
bfq_queue. This restore is useful, in particular, because it prevents
bfq_queues from losing their interactive weight raising prematurely,
as a consequence of spurious, short-lived soft real-time
weight-raising periods caused by wrong detections as soft real-time.
If, instead, a bfq_queue switches to soft-real-time weight raising
while it *is not* already in an interactive weight-raising period,
then the variable wr_start_at_switch_to_srt has no meaning during the
following soft real-time weight-raising period. Unfortunately the
handling of this case is wrong in BFQ: not only the variable is not
flagged somehow as meaningless, but it is also set to the time when
the switch to soft real-time weight-raising occurs. This may cause an
interactive weight-raising period to be considered mistakenly as still
in progress, and thus a spurious interactive weight-raising period to
start for the bfq_queue, at the end of the soft-real-time
weight-raising period. In particular the spurious interactive
weight-raising period will be considered as still in progress, if the
soft-real-time weight-raising period does not last very long. The
bfq_queue will then be wrongly privileged and, if I/O bound, will
unjustly steal bandwidth to truly interactive or soft real-time
bfq_queues, harming responsiveness and low latency.
This commit fixes this issue by just setting wr_start_at_switch_to_srt
to minus infinity (farthest past time instant according to jiffies
macros): when the soft-real-time weight-raising period ends, certainly
no interactive weight-raising period will be considered as still in
progress.
[1] Background I/O Type: Random - Background I/O mix: Reads and writes
- Application to start: LibreOffice Writer in
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.13-IO-Laptop
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <[email protected]>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <[email protected]>
Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <[email protected]>
Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <[email protected]>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <[email protected]>
Diffstat (limited to 'tools/perf/scripts/python/event_analyzing_sample.py')
0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions