This patchset implements IO cost model based work-conserving
proportional controller.
While io.latency provides the capability to comprehensively prioritize
and protect IOs depending on the cgroups, its protection is binary -
the lowest latency target cgroup which is suffering is protected at
the cost of all others. In many use cases including stacking multiple
workload containers in a single system, it's necessary to distribute
IO capacity with better granularity.
One challenge of controlling IO resources is the lack of trivially
observable cost metric. The most common metrics - bandwidth and iops
- can be off by orders of magnitude depending on the device type and
IO pattern. However, the cost isn't a complete mystery. Given
several key attributes, we can make fairly reliable predictions on how
expensive a given stream of IOs would be, at least compared to other
IO patterns.
The function which determines the cost of a given IO is the IO cost
model for the device. This controller distributes IO capacity based
on the costs estimated by such model. The more accurate the cost
model the better but the controller adapts based on IO completion
latency and as long as the relative costs across differents IO
patterns are consistent and sensible, it'll adapt to the actual
performance of the device.
Currently, the only implemented cost model is a simple linear one with
a few sets of default parameters for different classes of device.
This covers most common devices reasonably well. All the
infrastructure to tune and add different cost models is already in
place and a later patch will also allow using bpf progs for cost
models.
Please see the top comment in blk-iocost.c and documentation for
more details.
v2: Rebased on top of RQ_ALLOC_TIME changes and folded in Rik's fix
for a divide-by-zero bug in current_hweight() triggered by zero
inuse_sum.
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: Andy Newell <newella@fb.com>
Cc: Josef Bacik <jbacik@fb.com>
Cc: Rik van Riel <riel@surriel.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Tejun Heo