Re: [PATCH 0/4] dm-latency: Introduction

[Laurence Oberman <loberman@redhat.com>]

Mikulas
Thanks
This came from customer asking for support for similar functionality in proprietary solutions such as PowerPath and HDLM.
I had seen the information from Coly Li and asked if he could submit for comments.
I will look into what can be done with what is is /sys/block/dm-xxx/stat


Laurence Oberman
Red Hat Global Support Service
SEG Team

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mikulas Patocka" <mpatocka@redhat.com>
To: "device-mapper development" <dm-devel@redhat.com>, "Coly Li" <colyli@gmail.com>
Cc: "Tao Ma" <boyu.mt@taobao.com>, "Robin Dong" <sanbai@alibaba-inc.com>, "Laurence Oberman" <loberman@redhat.com>, "Alasdair Kergon" <agk@redhat.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2015 11:49:28 AM
Subject: Re: [dm-devel] [PATCH 0/4] dm-latency: Introduction

Hi

We have already dm-statistics that counts various events - see 
Documentation/device-mapper/statistics.txt. It counts the nubmer of 
requests and the time spent servicing each request, thus you can 
calculate average latency from these values.

Please look at dm-statistics to see if it fits your purpose. If you need 
additional information not provided by dm-statistics, it would be better 
to extend the statistics code rather than introduce new "latency" 
infrastructure.

Mikulas


On Thu, 26 Feb 2015, Coly Li wrote:

> From: Coly Li <bosong.ly@alibaba-inc.com>
> 
> Dm-latency patch set is an effort to measure hard disk I/O latency on
> top of device mapper layer. The original motivation of I/O latency
> measurement was to predict hard disk failure by machine learning method,
> I/O latency information was one of the inputs sent to machine learning
> model.
> 
> This patch set was written in Aug~Sep 2013, I deployed it on many
> servers of Alibaba cloud infrastructure. After running for weeks, some
> interesting data about hard disk I/O latency was observed. In 2013, I
> gave a talk on OpenSuSE Conference about this topic
> (http://blog.coly.li/docs/osc13-coly.pdf).
> 
> When generating time stamp for I/O request, clock source is a global
> unique resource which is protected by spin-locks. Dm-latency was tested
> on SAS/SATA hard disk and SATA SSD, it worked well as expected. Running
> dm-latency on PCI-e or NVMe SSD should work (I didn't test), but there
> will be spin-lock scalability issue, when accessing clock source for
> time stamping.
> 
> Dm-latency is good for I/O latency measurement to hard disk based
> storage, no matter local or distributed storage via network. For PCI-e
> or NVMe SSD, I suggest people to look for device provided statistic
> information, if there is.
> 
> The code is very simple, there is no resource allocation/destory, no
> spin_lock/spin_unlock. The patch set gets merged into Alibaba kernel
> more than 1 year, no bug reported in last 12 months.
> 
> This patch set has 4 patches,
> - [PATCH 1/4] dm-latency: move struct mapped_device from dm.c to dm.h
> - [PATCH 2/4] dm-latency: add I/O latency measurement in device mapper
> - [PATCH 3/4] dm-latency: add sysfs interface
> - [PATCH 4/4] dm-latency: add reset function to dm-latency in sysfs
> interface
> All these patches are rebased on Linux 4.0-rc1.
> 
> Today Laurence Oberman from Redhat sent me an email asking whether this
> patch set is upstream merged, because he is thinking of pulling this
> patch set into their kernel. I'd like to maintain this patch set, hope
> it could be merged.
> 
> Thanks in advance.
> 
> Coly Li
> 
> 
> 
> 
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