We noticed that the user interface of Android devices becomes very slow under memory pressure. This is because Android uses the zram driver on top of the loop driver for swapping, because under memory pressure the swap code alternates reads and writes quickly, because mq-deadline is the default scheduler for loop devices and because mq-deadline delays writes by five seconds for such a workload with default settings. Fix this by making the kernel select I/O scheduler 'none' from inside add_disk() for loop devices. This default can be overridden at any time from user space, e.g. via a udev rule. This approach has an advantage compared to changing the I/O scheduler from userspace from 'mq-deadline' into 'none', namely that synchronize_rcu() does not get called. This patch changes the default I/O scheduler for loop devices from 'mq-deadline' into 'none'. Additionally, this patch reduces the Android boot time on my test setup with 0.5 seconds compared to configuring the loop I/O scheduler from user space. Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxx> Cc: Ming Lei <ming.lei@xxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Tetsuo Handa <penguin-kernel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Martijn Coenen <maco@xxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Jaegeuk Kim <jaegeuk@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@xxxxxxx> --- drivers/block/loop.c | 3 ++- 1 file changed, 2 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/drivers/block/loop.c b/drivers/block/loop.c index f8486d9b75a4..fa1c298a8cfb 100644 --- a/drivers/block/loop.c +++ b/drivers/block/loop.c @@ -2333,7 +2333,8 @@ static int loop_add(int i) lo->tag_set.queue_depth = 128; lo->tag_set.numa_node = NUMA_NO_NODE; lo->tag_set.cmd_size = sizeof(struct loop_cmd); - lo->tag_set.flags = BLK_MQ_F_SHOULD_MERGE | BLK_MQ_F_STACKING; + lo->tag_set.flags = BLK_MQ_F_SHOULD_MERGE | BLK_MQ_F_STACKING | + BLK_MQ_F_NO_SCHED_BY_DEFAULT; lo->tag_set.driver_data = lo; err = blk_mq_alloc_tag_set(&lo->tag_set);
