Hi All, Here is the V3 of the IO controller patches generated on top of 2.6.30-rc7. Previous versions of the patches was posted here. http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/3/11/486 http://lkml.org/lkml/2009/5/5/275 This patchset is still work in progress but I want to keep on getting the snapshot of my tree out at regular intervals to get the feedback hence V3. Changes from V2 =============== - Now this patcheset supports per device per cgroup rules. Thanks to Gui for the patch. Previously a cgroup had same weight on all the block devices in the system. Now one can specify different weights on different devices for same cgroup. - Made disk time and disk sector statistics per device per cgroup. - Replaced the old io group refcounting patch with new patch from nauman. Core change being that during cgroup deletion we don't try to hold both io_cgroup lock and queue lock at the same time. - Fixed few bugs in per cgropup request descriptor infrastructure. There were instances when a process be put to indefinite sleep after frequent elevator switches. - Did some cleanups like get rid of rq->iog and rq->rl fields. Thanks to the nauman and Gui for ideas and patches. Got rid of some dead code too. - Introduced some more debugging help in the form of two more cgrop files "io.disk_queue" and "io.disk_dequeue". It gives the information how many a times a group was queued for disk access and how many a times it got out of contention. - Introduced an experimental debug patch where one can wait for new reuquest on an async queue before it is expired. Limitations =========== - This IO controller provides the bandwidth control at the IO scheduler level (leaf node in stacked hiearchy of logical devices). So there can be cases (depending on configuration) where application does not see proportional BW division at higher logical level device. LWN has written an article about the issue here. http://lwn.net/Articles/332839/ How to solve the issue of fairness at higher level logical devices ================================================================== Couple of suggestions have come forward. - Implement IO control at IO scheduler layer and then with the help of some daemon, adjust the weight on underlying devices dynamiclly, depending on what kind of BW gurantees are to be achieved at higher level logical block devices. - Also implement a higher level IO controller along with IO scheduler based controller and let user choose one depending on his needs. A higher level controller does not know about the assumptions/policies of unerldying IO scheduler, hence it has the potential to break down the IO scheduler's policy with-in cgroup. A lower level controller can work with IO scheduler much more closely and efficiently. Other active IO controller developments ======================================= IO throttling ------------- This is a max bandwidth controller and not the proportional one. Secondly it is a second level controller which can break the IO scheduler's policy/assumtions with-in cgroup. dm-ioband --------- This is a proportional bandwidth controller implemented as device mapper driver. It is also a second level controller which can break the IO scheduler's policy/assumptions with-in cgroup. Testing ======= Again, I have been able to do only very basic testing of reads and writes. Test1 (Fairness for synchronous reads) ====================================== - Two dd in two cgroups with cgrop weights 1000 and 500. Ran two "dd" in those cgroups (With CFQ scheduler and /sys/block/<device>/queue/fairness = 1) dd if=/mnt/$BLOCKDEV/zerofile1 of=/dev/null & dd if=/mnt/$BLOCKDEV/zerofile2 of=/dev/null & 234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 4.0167 s, 58.3 MB/s 234179072 bytes (234 MB) copied, 5.21889 s, 44.9 MB/s group1 time=8 16 2483 group1 sectors=8 16 457840 group2 time=8 16 1317 group2 sectors=8 16 242664 First two fields in time and sectors statistics represent major and minor number of the device. Third field represents disk time in milliseconds and number of sectors transferred respectively. This patchset tries to provide fairness in terms of disk time received. group1 got almost double of group2 disk time (At the time of first dd finish). These time and sectors statistics can be read using io.disk_time and io.disk_sector files in cgroup. More about it in documentation file. Test2 (Fairness for async writes) ================================= Fairness for async writes is tricy and biggest reason is that async writes are cached in higher layers (page cahe) and are dispatched to lower layers not necessarily in proportional manner. For example, consider two dd threads reading /dev/zero as input file and doing writes of huge files. Very soon we will cross vm_dirty_ratio and dd thread will be forced to write out some pages to disk before more pages can be dirtied. But not necessarily dirty pages of same thread are picked. It can very well pick the inode of lesser priority dd thread and do some writeout. So effectively higher weight dd is doing writeouts of lower weight dd pages and we don't see service differentation IOW, the core problem with async write fairness is that higher weight thread does not throw enought IO traffic at IO controller to keep the queue continuously backlogged. This are many .2 to .8 second intervals where higher weight queue is empty and in that duration lower weight queue get lots of job done giving the impression that there was no service differentiation. In summary, from IO controller point of view async writes support is there. Now we need to do some more work in higher layers to make sure higher weight process is not blocked behind IO of some lower weight process. This is a TODO item. So to test async writes I generated lots of write traffic in two cgroups (50 fio threads) and watched the disk time statistics in respective cgroups at the interval of 2 seconds. Thanks to ryo tsuruta for the test case. ***************************************************************** sync echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches fio_args="--size=64m --rw=write --numjobs=50 --group_reporting" echo $$ > /cgroup/bfqio/test1/tasks fio $fio_args --name=test1 --directory=/mnt/sdd1/fio/ --output=/mnt/sdd1/fio/test1.log & echo $$ > /cgroup/bfqio/test2/tasks fio $fio_args --name=test2 --directory=/mnt/sdd2/fio/ --output=/mnt/sdd2/fio/test2.log & *********************************************************************** And watched the disk time and sector statistics for the both the cgroups every 2 seconds using a script. How is snippet from output. test1 statistics: time=8 48 4325 sectors=8 48 226696 dq=8 48 2 test2 statistics: time=8 48 2163 sectors=8 48 107040 dq=8 48 1 test1 statistics: time=8 48 8460 sectors=8 48 489152 dq=8 48 4 test2 statistics: time=8 48 4425 sectors=8 48 256984 dq=8 48 3 test1 statistics: time=8 48 12928 sectors=8 48 792192 dq=8 48 6 test2 statistics: time=8 48 6813 sectors=8 48 384944 dq=8 48 5 test1 statistics: time=8 48 17256 sectors=8 48 1092744 dq=8 48 7 test2 statistics: time=8 48 8980 sectors=8 48 524840 dq=8 48 6 test1 statistics: time=8 48 20488 sectors=8 48 1300832 dq=8 48 8 test2 statistics: time=8 48 10920 sectors=8 48 634864 dq=8 48 7 First two fields in time and sectors statistics represent major and minor number of the device. Third field represents disk time in milliseconds and number of sectors transferred respectively. So disk time consumed by group1 is almost double of group2. TODO ==== - Lots of code cleanups, testing, bug fixing, optimizations, benchmarking etc... - Debug and fix some of the areas like page cache where higher weight cgroup async writes are stuck behind lower weight cgroup async writes. - Anticipatory code will need more work. It is not working properly currently and needs more thought regarding idling etc. Thanks Vivek -- dm-devel mailing list dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
