From 87760e5eef359788047d6fd54fc12eec74ce0d27 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Jens Axboe Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2016 12:38:14 -0700 Subject: block: hook up writeback throttling Enable throttling of buffered writeback to make it a lot more smooth, and has way less impact on other system activity. Background writeback should be, by definition, background activity. The fact that we flush huge bundles of it at the time means that it potentially has heavy impacts on foreground workloads, which isn't ideal. We can't easily limit the sizes of writes that we do, since that would impact file system layout in the presence of delayed allocation. So just throttle back buffered writeback, unless someone is waiting for it. The algorithm for when to throttle takes its inspiration in the CoDel networking scheduling algorithm. Like CoDel, blk-wb monitors the minimum latencies of requests over a window of time. In that window of time, if the minimum latency of any request exceeds a given target, then a scale count is incremented and the queue depth is shrunk. The next monitoring window is shrunk accordingly. Unlike CoDel, if we hit a window that exhibits good behavior, then we simply increment the scale count and re-calculate the limits for that scale value. This prevents us from oscillating between a close-to-ideal value and max all the time, instead remaining in the windows where we get good behavior. Unlike CoDel, blk-wb allows the scale count to to negative. This happens if we primarily have writes going on. Unlike positive scale counts, this doesn't change the size of the monitoring window. When the heavy writers finish, blk-bw quickly snaps back to it's stable state of a zero scale count. The patch registers a sysfs entry, 'wb_lat_usec'. This sets the latency target to me met. It defaults to 2 msec for non-rotational storage, and 75 msec for rotational storage. Setting this value to '0' disables blk-wb. Generally, a user would not have to touch this setting. We don't enable WBT on devices that are managed with CFQ, and have a non-root block cgroup attached. If we have a proportional share setup on this particular disk, then the wbt throttling will interfere with that. We don't have a strong need for wbt for that case, since we will rely on CFQ doing that for us. Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe --- block/Kconfig | 26 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 26 insertions(+) (limited to 'block/Kconfig') diff --git a/block/Kconfig b/block/Kconfig index 3a024440a669..8bf114a3858a 100644 --- a/block/Kconfig +++ b/block/Kconfig @@ -121,6 +121,32 @@ config BLK_CMDLINE_PARSER See Documentation/block/cmdline-partition.txt for more information. +config BLK_WBT + bool "Enable support for block device writeback throttling" + default n + ---help--- + Enabling this option enables the block layer to throttle buffered + background writeback from the VM, making it more smooth and having + less impact on foreground operations. The throttling is done + dynamically on an algorithm loosely based on CoDel, factoring in + the realtime performance of the disk. + +config BLK_WBT_SQ + bool "Single queue writeback throttling" + default n + depends on BLK_WBT + ---help--- + Enable writeback throttling by default on legacy single queue devices + +config BLK_WBT_MQ + bool "Multiqueue writeback throttling" + default y + depends on BLK_WBT + ---help--- + Enable writeback throttling by default on multiqueue devices. + Multiqueue currently doesn't have support for IO scheduling, + enabling this option is recommended. + menu "Partition Types" source "block/partitions/Kconfig" -- cgit v1.2.3-58-ga151