When a queue associated with a process remains empty, there are cases
where throughput gets boosted if the device is idled to await the
arrival of a new I/O request for that queue. Currently, BFQ assumes
that one of these cases is when the device has no internal queueing
(regardless of the properties of the I/O being served). Unfortunately,
this condition has proved to be too general. So, this commit refines it
as "the device has no internal queueing and is rotational".
This refinement provides a significant throughput boost with random
I/O, on flash-based storage without internal queueing. For example, on
a HiKey board, throughput increases by up to 125%, growing, e.g., from
6.9MB/s to 15.6MB/s with two or three random readers in parallel.
This commit also refactors the code related to device idling, for the
following reason. Finding the change that provides the above large
improvement has been slightly more difficult than it had to be,
because the logic that decides whether to idle the device is still
scattered across three functions. Almost all of the logic is in the
function bfq_bfqq_may_idle, but (1) part of the decision is made in
bfq_update_idle_window, and (2) the function bfq_bfqq_must_idle may
switch off idling regardless of the output of bfq_bfqq_may_idle. In
addition, both bfq_update_idle_window and bfq_bfqq_must_idle make
their decisions as a function of parameters that are used, for similar
purposes, also in bfq_bfqq_may_idle. This commit addresses this issue
by moving all the logic into bfq_bfqq_may_idle.
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Luca Miccio <lucmiccio@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: djb77 <dwayne.bakewell@gmail.com>
b72b02b26f