Hello,
This is the second revision of my patches fixing IO priority handling in the
block layer. Recently, I've been looking into 10% regression reported by our
performance measurement infrastructure in reaim benchmark that was bisected
down to 5a9d041ba2f6 ("block: move io_context creation into where it's
needed"). This didn't really make much sense and it took me a while to
understand this but the culprit is actually in even older commit e70344c05995
("block: fix default IO priority handling") and 5a9d041ba2f6 just made the
breakage visible. Essentially the problem was that after these commits some IO
was queued with IO priority class IOPRIO_CLASS_BE while other IO was queued
with IOPRIO_CLASS_NONE and as a result they could not be merged together
resulting in performance regression. I think what commit e70344c05995 ("block:
fix default IO priority handling") did is actually broken not only because of
this performance regression but because of other reasons as well (see changelog
of patch 3/8 for details). Besides this problem, there are multiple other
inconsistencies in the IO priority handling throughout the block stack we have
identified when discussing this with Damien Le Moal. So this patch set aims at
fixing all these various issues.
Note that there are a few choices I've made I'm not 100% sold on. In particular
the conversion of blk-ioprio from rqos is somewhat disputable since it now
incurs a cost similar to blk-throttle in the bio submission fast path (need to
load bio->bi_blkg->pd[ioprio_policy.plid]). If people think the removed
boilerplate code is not worth the cost, I can certainly go via the "additional
rqos hook" path.
Honza
Previous versions:
Link: http://lore.kernel.org/r/20220601132347.13543-1-jack@xxxxxxx # v1
