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Paolo Valente 4baa8bb13f block, bfq: fix wrong init of saved start time for weight raising
This commit fixes a bug that causes bfq to fail to guarantee a high
responsiveness on some drives, if there is heavy random read+write I/O
in the background. More precisely, such a failure allowed this bug to
be found [1], but the bug may well cause other yet unreported
anomalies.

BFQ raises the weight of the bfq_queues associated with soft real-time
applications, to privilege the I/O, and thus reduce latency, for these
applications. This mechanism is named soft-real-time weight raising in
BFQ. A soft real-time period may happen to be nested into an
interactive weight raising period, i.e., it may happen that, when a
bfq_queue switches to a soft real-time weight-raised state, the
bfq_queue is already being weight-raised because deemed interactive
too. In this case, BFQ saves in a special variable
wr_start_at_switch_to_srt, the time instant when the interactive
weight-raising period started for the bfq_queue, i.e., the time
instant when BFQ started to deem the bfq_queue interactive. This value
is then used to check whether the interactive weight-raising period
would still be in progress when the soft real-time weight-raising
period ends.  If so, interactive weight raising is restored for the
bfq_queue. This restore is useful, in particular, because it prevents
bfq_queues from losing their interactive weight raising prematurely,
as a consequence of spurious, short-lived soft real-time
weight-raising periods caused by wrong detections as soft real-time.

If, instead, a bfq_queue switches to soft-real-time weight raising
while it *is not* already in an interactive weight-raising period,
then the variable wr_start_at_switch_to_srt has no meaning during the
following soft real-time weight-raising period. Unfortunately the
handling of this case is wrong in BFQ: not only the variable is not
flagged somehow as meaningless, but it is also set to the time when
the switch to soft real-time weight-raising occurs. This may cause an
interactive weight-raising period to be considered mistakenly as still
in progress, and thus a spurious interactive weight-raising period to
start for the bfq_queue, at the end of the soft-real-time
weight-raising period. In particular the spurious interactive
weight-raising period will be considered as still in progress, if the
soft-real-time weight-raising period does not last very long. The
bfq_queue will then be wrongly privileged and, if I/O bound, will
unjustly steal bandwidth to truly interactive or soft real-time
bfq_queues, harming responsiveness and low latency.

This commit fixes this issue by just setting wr_start_at_switch_to_srt
to minus infinity (farthest past time instant according to jiffies
macros): when the soft-real-time weight-raising period ends, certainly
no interactive weight-raising period will be considered as still in
progress.

[1] Background I/O Type: Random - Background I/O mix: Reads and writes
- Application to start: LibreOffice Writer in
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4.13-IO-Laptop

Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Angelo Ruocco <angeloruocco90@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Tested-by: Lee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com>
Tested-by: Mirko Montanari <mirkomontanari91@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2017-10-03 08:40:54 -06:00
arch Microblaze patches for 4.14-rc3 2017-09-25 15:37:19 -07:00
block block, bfq: fix wrong init of saved start time for weight raising 2017-10-03 08:40:54 -06:00
certs modsign: add markers to endif-statements in certs/Makefile 2017-07-14 11:01:37 +10:00
crypto crypto: af_alg - update correct dst SGL entry 2017-09-20 17:42:42 +08:00
Documentation DeviceTree fixes for 4.14: 2017-09-24 16:04:12 -07:00
drivers buffer: have alloc_page_buffers() use __GFP_NOFAIL 2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
firmware firmware: Restore support for built-in firmware 2017-09-16 10:58:48 -07:00
fs writeback: only allow one inflight and pending full flush 2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
include writeback: only allow one inflight and pending full flush 2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
init Merge branch 'work.mount' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/viro/vfs 2017-09-14 18:54:01 -07:00
ipc fix a typo in put_compat_shm_info() 2017-09-25 20:41:46 -04:00
kernel block: fix a build error 2017-09-26 12:07:24 -06:00
lib Merge branch 'parisc-4.14-2' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/deller/parisc-linux 2017-09-23 06:14:06 -10:00
mm writeback: pass in '0' for nr_pages writeback in laptop mode 2017-10-03 08:38:17 -06:00
net Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-09-23 05:41:27 -10:00
samples media updates for v4.14-rc1 2017-09-07 12:53:14 -07:00
scripts DeviceTree fixes for 4.14: 2017-09-24 16:04:12 -07:00
security Merge branch 'next-general' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/jmorris/linux-security 2017-09-24 11:40:41 -07:00
sound vfs: constify path argument to kernel_read_file_from_path 2017-09-14 20:18:45 -07:00
tools Merge branch 'x86-urgent-for-linus' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tip/tip 2017-09-24 12:33:58 -07:00
usr ramfs: clarify help text that compression applies to ramfs as well as legacy ramdisk. 2017-07-06 16:24:30 -07:00
virt Revert "KVM: Don't accept obviously wrong gsi values via KVM_IRQFD" 2017-09-19 08:37:17 +02:00
.cocciconfig scripts: add Linux .cocciconfig for coccinelle 2016-07-22 12:13:39 +02:00
.get_maintainer.ignore Add hch to .get_maintainer.ignore 2015-08-21 14:30:10 -07:00
.gitattributes .gitattributes: set git diff driver for C source code files 2016-10-07 18:46:30 -07:00
.gitignore kbuild: Add support to generate LLVM assembly files 2017-04-25 08:13:52 +09:00
.mailmap power supply and reset changes for the v4.12 series (part 2) 2017-05-12 12:02:21 -07:00
COPYING
CREDITS selinux/stable-4.14 PR 20170831 2017-09-12 13:21:00 -07:00
Kbuild kbuild: Consolidate header generation from ASM offset information 2017-04-13 05:43:37 +09:00
Kconfig kbuild: migrate all arch to the kconfig mainmenu upgrade 2010-09-19 22:54:11 -04:00
MAINTAINERS Merge git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/davem/net 2017-09-23 05:41:27 -10:00
Makefile Linux 4.14-rc2 2017-09-24 16:38:56 -07:00
README README: add a new README file, pointing to the Documentation/ 2016-10-24 08:12:35 -02:00

Linux kernel
============

This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst

Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users.
These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.