Re: [PATCH 0/6] buffered write IO controller in balance_dirty_pages()

[Suresh Jayaraman <sjayaraman@suse.com>]

On 03/28/2012 05:43 PM, Fengguang Wu wrote:
> Here is one possible solution to "buffered write IO controller", based on Linux
> v3.3
> 
> git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/wfg/linux.git  buffered-write-io-controller
> 

The implementation looks unbelievably simple. I ran a few tests
(throttling) and I found it working well generally.

> Features:
> - support blkio.weight
> - support blkio.throttle.buffered_write_bps
> 
> Possibilities:
> - it's trivial to support per-bdi .weight or .buffered_write_bps
> 
> Pros:
> 1) simple
> 2) virtually no space/time overheads
> 3) independent of the block layer and IO schedulers, hence
> 3.1) supports all filesystems/storages, eg. NFS/pNFS, CIFS, sshfs, ...
> 3.2) supports all IO schedulers. One may use noop for SSDs, inside virtual machines, over iSCSI, etc.
> 
> Cons:
> 1) don't try to smooth bursty IO submission in the flusher thread (*)
> 2) don't support IOPS based throttling
> 3) introduces semantic differences to blkio.weight, which will be
>    - working by "bandwidth" for buffered writes
>    - working by "device time" for direct IO

There is a chance that this semantic difference might confuse users.

> (*) Maybe not a big concern, since the bursties are limited to 500ms: if one dd
> is throttled to 50% disk bandwidth, the flusher thread will be waking up on
> every 1 second, keep the disk busy for 500ms and then go idle for 500ms; if
> throttled to 10% disk bandwidth, the flusher thread will wake up on every 5s,
> keep busy for 500ms and stay idle for 4.5s.
> 
> The test results included in the last patch look pretty good in despite of the
> simple implementation.
> 
>  [PATCH 1/6] blk-cgroup: move blk-cgroup.h in include/linux/blk-cgroup.h
>  [PATCH 2/6] blk-cgroup: account dirtied pages
>  [PATCH 3/6] blk-cgroup: buffered write IO controller - bandwidth weight
>  [PATCH 4/6] blk-cgroup: buffered write IO controller - bandwidth limit
>  [PATCH 5/6] blk-cgroup: buffered write IO controller - bandwidth limit interface
>  [PATCH 6/6] blk-cgroup: buffered write IO controller - debug trace
> 

How about a BOF on this topic during LSF/MM as there seems to be enough
interest?


Thanks
Suresh