[PATCH 0/7] [RFC] iosched: make a difference between read/readahead requests

Fengguang Wu
2006-06-24T15:17:29Z

Hi Jens,

This patchset does two jobs:
1) do io schedule differently on READ/READA requests.
- to help improve I/O latency and throughput
2) do notification/action on READA => READ events
- to make the elevators better informed
- to prevent the priority inversion problem
- also brings some CPU overheads(*)

(*) Most overheads should be in functions deadline_kick_page() and
deadline_add_drq_fifo(). Optimizations should be possible.

The features are required when one is doing a lot of fadvise(WILLNEED) calls,
and do not want to interfere with normal I/Os. Servers that serve lots of
concurrent clients would benifit a lot, too.

The patches come in two groups:

1) explicitly schedule READA requests
Note: currently only the deadline elevator is touched.

[PATCH 1/7] iosched: introduce WRITEA
[PATCH 2/7] iosched: introduce parameter deadline.reada_expire
[PATCH 3/7] iosched: introduce deadline_add_drq_fifo()
[PATCH 4/7] iosched: submit READA requests on possible readahead code path

2) notify/act on pending reads
Naming issue: how about pending_read/need_page/... for kick_page?

[PATCH 5/7] iosched: introduce elv_kick_page()
[PATCH 6/7] iosched: run elv_kick_page() on sync read
[PATCH 7/7] iosched: introduce deadline_kick_page()

Any comments are welcome, thanks.

Fengguang Wu
--
Dept. Automation University of Science and Technology of China