On Tue, Oct 10, 2017 at 11:23:45AM -0700, Omar Sandoval wrote: > On Mon, Oct 09, 2017 at 07:24:23PM +0800, Ming Lei wrote: > > SCSI devices use host-wide tagset, and the shared driver tag space is > > often quite big. Meantime there is also queue depth for each lun( > > .cmd_per_lun), which is often small, for example, on both lpfc and > > qla2xxx, .cmd_per_lun is just 3. > > > > So lots of requests may stay in sw queue, and we always flush all > > belonging to same hw queue and dispatch them all to driver, unfortunately > > it is easy to cause queue busy because of the small .cmd_per_lun. > > Once these requests are flushed out, they have to stay in hctx->dispatch, > > and no bio merge can participate into these requests, and sequential IO > > performance is hurt a lot. > > > > This patch introduces blk_mq_dequeue_from_ctx for dequeuing request from > > sw queue so that we can dispatch them in scheduler's way, then we can > > avoid to dequeue too many requests from sw queue when ->dispatch isn't > > flushed completely. > > > > This patch improves dispatching from sw queue when there is per-request-queue > > queue depth by taking request one by one from sw queue, just like the way > > of IO scheduler. > > This still didn't address Jens' concern about using q->queue_depth as > the heuristic for whether to do the full sw queue flush or one-by-one > dispatch. The EWMA approach is a bit too complex for now, can you please > try the heuristic of whether the driver ever returned BLK_STS_RESOURCE? That can be done easily, but I am not sure if it is good. For example, inside queue rq path of NVMe, kmalloc(GFP_ATOMIC) is often used, if kmalloc() returns NULL just once, BLK_STS_RESOURCE will be returned to blk-mq, then blk-mq will never do full sw queue flush even when kmalloc() always succeed from that time on. Even EWMA approach isn't good on SCSI-MQ too, because some SCSI's .cmd_per_lun is very small, such as 3 on lpfc and qla2xxx, and one full flush will trigger BLK_STS_RESOURCE easily. So I suggest to use the way of q->queue_depth first, since we don't get performance degrade report on other devices(!q->queue_depth) with blk-mq. We can improve this way in the future if we have better approach. What do you think about it? -- Ming