block, bfq: detect wakers and unconditionally inject their I/O

A bfq_queue Q may happen to be synchronized with another
bfq_queue Q2, i.e., the I/O of Q2 may need to be completed for Q to
receive new I/O. We call Q2 "waker queue".

If I/O plugging is being performed for Q, and Q is not receiving any
more I/O because of the above synchronization, then, thanks to BFQ's
injection mechanism, the waker queue is likely to get served before
the I/O-plugging timeout fires.

Unfortunately, this fact may not be sufficient to guarantee a high
throughput during the I/O plugging, because the inject limit for Q may
be too low to guarantee a lot of injected I/O. In addition, the
duration of the plugging, i.e., the time before Q finally receives new
I/O, may not be minimized, because the waker queue may happen to be
served only after other queues.

To address these issues, this commit introduces the explicit detection
of the waker queue, and the unconditional injection of a pending I/O
request of the waker queue on each invocation of
bfq_dispatch_request().

One may be concerned that this systematic injection of I/O from the
waker queue delays the service of Q's I/O. Fortunately, it doesn't. On
the contrary, next Q's I/O is brought forward dramatically, for it is
not blocked for milliseconds.

Reported-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat (VMware) <srivatsa@csail.mit.edu>
Tested-by: Srivatsa S. Bhat (VMware) <srivatsa@csail.mit.edu>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
2 files changed