Re: [PATCH v3 2/2] ublk: require unique task per io instead of unique task per hctx

[Ming Lei <ming.lei@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2025 at 06:17:51PM -0600, Uday Shankar wrote:
> Currently, ublk_drv associates to each hardware queue (hctx) a unique
> task (called the queue's ubq_daemon) which is allowed to issue
> COMMIT_AND_FETCH commands against the hctx. If any other task attempts
> to do so, the command fails immediately with EINVAL. When considered
> together with the block layer architecture, the result is that for each
> CPU C on the system, there is a unique ublk server thread which is
> allowed to handle I/O submitted on CPU C. This can lead to suboptimal
> performance under imbalanced load generation. For an extreme example,
> suppose all the load is generated on CPUs mapping to a single ublk
> server thread. Then that thread may be fully utilized and become the
> bottleneck in the system, while other ublk server threads are totally
> idle.
> 
> This issue can also be addressed directly in the ublk server without
> kernel support by having threads dequeue I/Os and pass them around to
> ensure even load. But this solution requires inter-thread communication
> at least twice for each I/O (submission and completion), which is
> generally a bad pattern for performance. The problem gets even worse
> with zero copy, as more inter-thread communication would be required to
> have the buffer register/unregister calls to come from the correct
> thread.

Agree.

The limit is actually originated from current implementation, both
REGISTER_IO_BUF and UNREGISTER_IO_BUF should be fine to run from other
pthread because the request buffer 'meta' is actually read-only.

> 
> Therefore, address this issue in ublk_drv by requiring a unique task per
> I/O instead of per queue/hctx. Imbalanced load can then be balanced
> across all ublk server threads by having threads issue FETCH_REQs in a
> round-robin manner. As a small toy example, consider a system with a
> single ublk device having 2 queues, each of queue depth 4. A ublk server
> having 4 threads could issue its FETCH_REQs against this device as
> follows (where each entry is the qid,tag pair that the FETCH_REQ
> targets):
> 
> poller thread:	T0	T1	T2	T3
> 		0,0	0,1	0,2	0,3
> 		1,3	1,0	1,1	1,2
> 
> Since tags appear to be allocated in sequential chunks, this setup
> provides a rough approximation to distributing I/Os round-robin across
> all ublk server threads, while letting I/Os stay fully thread-local.

BLK_MQ_F_TAG_RR can be set for this way, so is it possible to make this
as one feature? And set BLK_MQ_F_TAG_RR for this feature.

Also can you share what the preferred implementation is for ublk server?

I think per-io pthread may not be good, maybe partition tags space into
fixed range/pthread?

`ublk_queue' reference is basically read-only in IO code path, I think
it need to be declared explicitly as 'const' pointer in IO code/uring code
path first. Otherwise, it is easy to trigger data race with per-io task
since it is lockless.


Thanks, 
Ming