Re: [PATCH 1/4] blk-mq: introduce BLK_MQ_F_SCHED_USE_HW_TAG

Omar Sandoval
2017-05-03T16:46:33Z

On Fri, Apr 28, 2017 at 11:15:36PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> When blk-mq I/O scheduler is used, we need two tags for
> submitting one request. One is called scheduler tag for
> allocating request and scheduling I/O, another one is called
> driver tag, which is used for dispatching IO to hardware/driver.
> This way introduces one extra per-queue allocation for both tags
> and request pool, and may not be as efficient as case of none
> scheduler.
>
> Also currently we put a default per-hctx limit on schedulable
> requests, and this limit may be a bottleneck for some devices,
> especialy when these devices have a quite big tag space.
>
> This patch introduces BLK_MQ_F_SCHED_USE_HW_TAG so that we can
> allow to use hardware/driver tags directly for IO scheduling if
> devices's hardware tag space is big enough. Then we can avoid
> the extra resource allocation and make IO submission more
> efficient.
>
> Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>
> ---
> block/blk-mq-sched.c | 10 +++++++++-
> block/blk-mq.c | 35 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++------
> include/linux/blk-mq.h | 1 +
> 3 files changed, 39 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)

One more note on this: if we're using the hardware tags directly, then
we are no longer limited to q->nr_requests requests in-flight. Instead,
we're limited to the hw queue depth. We probably want to maintain the
original behavior, so I think we need to resize the hw tags in
blk_mq_init_sched() if we're using hardware tags.