This year, we only had two scribes from LWN.net, not three, so there won't be any coverage of the IO track when we split into three tracks. To cover for that, here are my notes of the four separated sessions === Multiqueue Interrupt and Queue Assignment; Hannes Reinecke ---------------------------------------------------------- All multiqueue devices need an interrupt allocation policy and an affinity but who should set it? Christoph Hellwig suggested making what NVMe currently does the default (and has patches). There then followed a discussion about interrupt allocation which concluded that realistically, we do want the block layer doing it because having a single policy for the whole system is by far the simplest mechanism. We should wait for evidence that this can't be made to work at all (which we don't have) before we try to tamper with it. Blk-mq Implementor Feedback; Hannes Reinecke, Matthew Wilcox, Keith Busch ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This began with a discussion of tag allocation policy: blkmq only allows for a host wide tag space which is partitioned amongst the number of hardware queues. Potentially this leads to a tag starvation issue where the number of host tags is small and the number of hardware queues is large. Consensus was that the problem is currently theoretical but that driver writers should take care to make sure they don't allocate too many hardware queues if they have a limited number of tags. The next problem was abort because of a potential tag re-use issue. After discussion it was agreed there should be no problem because the tag is held until the abort completes (and the command killed) or error handling is escalated (in which case the whole host is quiesced). There was a lot of complaining about the host quiesce part because it takes a while to do on a fully loaded host and also path switchover cannot occur until it has been completed, so multipath recovery takes much longer than it should. The general agreement was that this could be alleviated somewhat if we could quiesce a single LUN first and issue a LUN reset rather than doing the whole host after the abort. Mike Christie will send patches for LUN quiescing. IO Cost Estimation; Tejun Heo ----------------------------- This session began with a description of how the block cgroup currently works: it has two modes: bandwidth limiting which works regardless of I/O scheduler and proportional allocation, which only works with the CFQ I/O scheduler. Obviously, because blk-mq currently has no scheduler, it's not possible to do proportional allocation with it. The generic discussion then opened with how do we do correct I/O cost estimation even with blk-mq so we can do some sort of proportional allocation. This is actually a very hard problem to solve, particularly now that we have to consider SSDs because a large set of sequential writes are much less likely to excite the write amplification caused by garbage collection than a set of scattered writes. In an ideal world, we'd like to penalise the process doing the scattered writes for all of the write amplification as well. However, after much discussion, it was agreed that the heuristics to try to do this would end up being very complex and would likely fail in corner cases anyway, so the best we could do was assess proportions based on request latency, even though that would not be completely fair to some workloads. Multipath - Mike Snitzer ------------------------ Mike began with a request for feedback, which quickly lead to the complaint that recovery time (and how you recover) was one of the biggest issues in device mapper multipath (dmmp) for those in the room. This is primarily caused by having to wait for the pending I/O to be released by the failing path. Christoph Hellwig said that NVMe would soon do path failover internally (without any need for dmmp) and asked if people would be interested in a more general implementation of this. Martin Petersen said he would look at implementing this in SCSI as well. The discussion noted that internal path failover only works in the case where the transport is the same across all the paths and supports some type of path down notification. In any cases where this isn't true (such as failover from fibre channel to iSCSI) you still have to use dmmp. Other benefits of internal path failover are that the transport level code is much better qualified to recognise when the same device appears over multiple paths, so it should make a lot of the configuration seamless. The consequence for end users would be that now SCSI devices would become handles for end devices rather than handles for paths to end devices. James -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
