RE: [PATCH] io stalls

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Tue, 2003-06-10 at 19:04, Robert White wrote:
> From: Chris Mason [mailto:mason@suse.com]
> Sent: Monday, June 09, 2003 7:13 PM
> 
> > 2) Provide a somewhat obvious patch that makes the current
> > __get_request_wait call significantly more fair, in hopes of either
> > blaming it for the stalls or removing it from the list of candidates
> 
> Without the a_w_q_exclusive() on add_wait_queue the FIFO effect is lost when
> all the members of the wait queue compete for their timeslice in the
> scheduler.  For all intents and purposes the fairness goes up some (you stop
> having the one guy sorted to the un-happy end of the disk) but low priority
> tasks will still always end up stalled on the dirty end of the stick.
> Basically each new round at the queue-empty moment is a mob rush for the
> door.
> 
> With the a_w_q_exclusive(), you get past fair and well into anti-optimal.
> Your FIFO becomes essentially mandatory with no regard for anything but the
> order things hit the wait queue.  (Particularly on an SMP machine, however)
> "new requestors" may/will jump to the head of the line because they were
> never *in* the wait queue.  

The patches flying around force new io into the wait queue any time
someone else is already waiting, nobody is allowed to jump to the head
of the line.

The rest of your ideas are interesting, we just can't smush them into
2.4.  Please consider doing some experiments on the 2.5 io schedulers
and making suggestions, it's a critical area.

-chris