Re: [PATCH 3/3] block: Polling completion performance optimization

Keith Busch
2017-12-21T23:10:55Z

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 03:17:41PM -0700, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 12/21/17 2:34 PM, Keith Busch wrote:
> > It would be nice, but the driver doesn't know a request's completion
> > is going to be a polled.
>
> That's trivially solvable though, since the information is available
> at submission time.
>
> > Even if it did, we don't have a spec defined
> > way to tell the controller not to send an interrupt with this command's
> > compeletion, which would be negated anyway if any interrupt driven IO
> > is mixed in the same queue. We could possibly create a special queue
> > with interrupts disabled for this purpose if we can pass the HIPRI hint
> > through the request.
>
> There's on way to do it per IO, right. But you can create a sq/cq pair
> without interrupts enabled. This would also allow you to scale better
> with multiple users of polling, a case where we currently don't
> perform as well spdk, for instance.

Would you be open to have blk-mq provide special hi-pri hardware contexts
for all these requests to come through? Maybe one per NUMA node? If not,
I don't think have enough unused bits in the NVMe command id to stash
the hctx id to extract the original request.