Re: [PATCH 4/4] scsi: core: don't limit per-LUN queue depth for SSD

Martin K. Petersen
2019-11-22T03:00:17Z

Ming,

> I don't understand the motivation of ramp-up/ramp-down, maybe it is just
> for fairness among LUNs.

Congestion control. Devices have actual, physical limitations that are
different from the tag context limitations on the HBA. You don't have
that problem on NVMe because (at least for PCIe) the storage device and
the controller are one and the same.

If you submit 100000 concurrent requests to a SCSI drive that does 100
IOPS, some requests will time out before they get serviced.
Consequently we have the ability to raise and lower the queue depth to
constrain the amount of requests in flight to a given device at any
point in time.

Also, devices use BUSY/QUEUE_FULL/TASK_SET_FULL to cause the OS to back
off. We frequently see issues where the host can submit burst I/O much
faster than the device can de-stage from cache. In that scenario the
device reports BUSY/QF/TSF and we will back off so the device gets a
chance to recover. If we just let the application submit new I/O without
bounds, the system would never actually recover.

Note that the actual, physical limitations for how many commands a
target can handle are typically much, much lower than the number of tags
the HBA can manage. SATA devices can only express 32 concurrent
commands. SAS devices typically 128 concurrent commands per
port. Arrays differ.

If we ignore the RAID controller use case where the controller
internally queues and arbitrates commands between many devices, how is
submitting 1000 concurrent requests to a device which only has 128
command slots going to work?

Some HBAs have special sauce to manage BUSY/QF/TSF, some don't. If we
blindly stop restricting the number of I/Os in flight in the ML, we may
exceed either the capabilities of what the transport protocol can
express or internal device resources.

--
Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering