linux_dsm_epyc7002/Documentation/block
Jens Axboe 87760e5eef block: hook up writeback throttling
Enable throttling of buffered writeback to make it a lot
more smooth, and has way less impact on other system activity.
Background writeback should be, by definition, background
activity. The fact that we flush huge bundles of it at the time
means that it potentially has heavy impacts on foreground workloads,
which isn't ideal. We can't easily limit the sizes of writes that
we do, since that would impact file system layout in the presence
of delayed allocation. So just throttle back buffered writeback,
unless someone is waiting for it.

The algorithm for when to throttle takes its inspiration in the
CoDel networking scheduling algorithm. Like CoDel, blk-wb monitors
the minimum latencies of requests over a window of time. In that
window of time, if the minimum latency of any request exceeds a
given target, then a scale count is incremented and the queue depth
is shrunk. The next monitoring window is shrunk accordingly. Unlike
CoDel, if we hit a window that exhibits good behavior, then we
simply increment the scale count and re-calculate the limits for that
scale value. This prevents us from oscillating between a
close-to-ideal value and max all the time, instead remaining in the
windows where we get good behavior.

Unlike CoDel, blk-wb allows the scale count to to negative. This
happens if we primarily have writes going on. Unlike positive
scale counts, this doesn't change the size of the monitoring window.
When the heavy writers finish, blk-bw quickly snaps back to it's
stable state of a zero scale count.

The patch registers a sysfs entry, 'wb_lat_usec'. This sets the latency
target to me met. It defaults to 2 msec for non-rotational storage, and
75 msec for rotational storage. Setting this value to '0' disables
blk-wb. Generally, a user would not have to touch this setting.

We don't enable WBT on devices that are managed with CFQ, and have
a non-root block cgroup attached. If we have a proportional share setup
on this particular disk, then the wbt throttling will interfere with
that. We don't have a strong need for wbt for that case, since we will
rely on CFQ doing that for us.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>
2016-11-10 13:53:40 -07:00
..
00-INDEX Documentation: update missing index files in block/00-INDEX 2016-03-31 00:44:26 -06:00
biodoc.txt block: better op and flags encoding 2016-10-28 08:48:16 -06:00
biovecs.txt Documentation: update notes in biovecs about arbitrarily sized bios 2015-08-13 12:32:07 -06:00
capability.txt genhd: expose AN to user space 2007-05-23 20:14:11 -07:00
cfq-iosched.txt block: replace REQ_NOIDLE with REQ_IDLE 2016-11-01 09:43:26 -06:00
cmdline-partition.txt block: change config option name for cmdline partition parsing 2013-09-30 14:31:02 -07:00
data-integrity.txt block: Remove integrity tagging functions 2014-09-27 09:14:50 -06:00
deadline-iosched.txt trivial: Miscellaneous documentation typo fixes 2009-06-12 18:01:47 +02:00
ioprio.txt Update Jens Axboe's email in Documentation/* 2007-10-16 09:59:55 +02:00
null_blk.txt null_blk: register as a LightNVM device 2015-11-16 15:22:28 -07:00
pr.txt block: add an API for Persistent Reservations 2015-10-21 14:46:56 -06:00
queue-sysfs.txt block: hook up writeback throttling 2016-11-10 13:53:40 -07:00
request.txt Update Jens Axboe's email in Documentation/* 2007-10-16 09:59:55 +02:00
stat.txt [PATCH] block/stat.txt 2006-01-08 20:14:01 -08:00
switching-sched.txt Documentation: drop as block elevator reference in switching-sched.txt 2011-11-04 12:01:48 -07:00
writeback_cache_control.txt block, drivers, fs: rename REQ_FLUSH to REQ_PREFLUSH 2016-06-07 13:41:38 -06:00