Re: [RFC PATCH dm-ioband] Added in blktrace msgs for dm-ioband

[Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>]

Ryo Tsuruta wrote:
> Hi Li,
> 
> From: Ryo Tsuruta <ryov@valinux.co.jp>
> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH dm-ioband] Added in blktrace msgs for dm-ioband
> Date: Thu, 07 May 2009 09:23:22 +0900 (JST)
> 
>> Hi Li,
>>
>> From: Li Zefan <lizf@cn.fujitsu.com>
>> Subject: Re: [RFC PATCH dm-ioband] Added in blktrace msgs for dm-ioband
>> Date: Mon, 04 May 2009 11:24:27 +0800
>>
>>> Ryo Tsuruta wrote:
>>>> Hi Alan,
>>>>
>>>>> Hi Ryo -
>>>>>
>>>>> I don't know if you are taking in patches, but whilst trying to uncover
>>>>> some odd behavior I added some blktrace messages to dm-ioband-ctl.c. If
>>>>> you're keeping one code base for old stuff (2.6.18-ish RHEL stuff) and
>>>>> upstream you'll have to #if around these (the blktrace message stuff
>>>>> came in around 2.6.26 or 27 I think).
>>>>>
>>>>> My test case was to take a single 400GB storage device, put two 200GB
>>>>> partitions on it and then see what the "penalty" or overhead for adding
>>>>> dm-ioband on top. To do this I simply created an ext2 FS on each
>>>>> partition in parallel (two processes each doing a mkfs to one of the
>>>>> partitions). Then I put two dm-ioband devices on top of the two
>>>>> partitions (setting the weight to 100 in both cases - thus they should
>>>>> have equal access).
>>>>>
>>>>> Using default values I was seeing /very/ large differences - on the
>>>>> order of 3X. When I bumped the number of tokens to a large number
>>>>> (10,240) the timings got much closer (<2%). I have found that using
>>>>> weight-iosize performs worse than weight (closer to 5% penalty).
>>>> I could reproduce similar results. One dm-ioband device seems to stop
>>>> issuing I/Os for a few seconds at times. I'll investigate more on that.
>>>>  
>>>>> I'll try to formalize these results as I go forward and report out on
>>>>> them. In any event, I thought I'd share this patch with you if you are
>>>>> interested...
>>>> Thanks. I'll include your patche into the next release.
>>>>  
>>> IMO we should use TRACE_EVENT instead of adding new blk_add_trace_msg().
>> Thanks for your suggestion. I'll use TRACE_EVENT instead.
> 
> blk_add_trace_msg() supports both blktrace and tracepoints. I can
> get messages from dm-ioband through debugfs. Could you expain why
> should we use TRACE_EVENT instead?
> 

Actually blk_add_trace_msg() has nothing to do with tracepoints..

If we use blk_add_trace_msg() is dm, we can use it in md, various block
drivers and even ext4. So the right thing is, if a subsystem wants to add
trace facility, it should use tracepoints/TRACE_EVENT.

With TRACE_EVENT, you can get output through debugfs too, and it can be used
together with blktrace:

 # echo 1 > /sys/block/dm/trace/enable
 # echo blk > /debugfs/tracing/current_tracer
 # echo dm-ioband-foo > /debugfs/tracing/tracing/set_event
 # cat /deubgfs/tracing/trace_pipe
 
And you can enable dm-ioband-foo while disabling dm-ioband-bar, and you can
use filter feature too.

>>>>> Here's a sampling from some blktrace output (sorry for the wrapping) - I
>>>>> should note that I'm a bit scared to see such large numbers of holds
>>>>> going on when the token count should be >5,000 for each device...
>>>>> Holding these back in an equal access situation is inhibiting the block
>>>>> I/O layer to merge (most) of these (as mkfs performs lots & lots of
>>>>> small but sequential I/Os).
>> Thanks,
>> Ryo Tsuruta
> 
> Thanks,
> Ryo Tsuruta
>