dm-ioband + bio-cgroup benchmarks

[Hirokazu Takahashi]

Hi, Andrea,

> >> Ok, I will give more details of the thought process.
> >>
> >> I was thinking of maintaing an rb-tree per request queue and not an
> >> rb-tree per cgroup. This tree can contain all the bios submitted to that
> >> request queue through __make_request(). Every node in the tree will represent
> >> one cgroup and will contain a list of bios issued from the tasks from that
> >> cgroup.
> >>
> >> Every bio entering the request queue through __make_request() function
> >> first will be queued in one of the nodes in this rb-tree, depending on which
> >> cgroup that bio belongs to.
> >>
> >> Once the bios are buffered in rb-tree, we release these to underlying
> >> elevator depending on the proportionate weight of the nodes/cgroups.
> >>
> >> Some more details which I was trying to implement yesterday.
> >>
> >> There will be one bio_cgroup object per cgroup. This object will contain
> >> many bio_group objects. Each bio_group object will be created for each
> >> request queue where a bio from bio_cgroup is queued. Essentially the idea
> >> is that bios belonging to a cgroup can be on various request queues in the
> >> system. So a single object can not serve the purpose as it can not be on
> >> many rb-trees at the same time.  Hence create one sub object which will keep
> >> track of bios belonging to one cgroup on a particular request queue.
> >>
> >> Each bio_group will contain a list of bios and this bio_group object will
> >> be a node in the rb-tree of request queue. For example. Lets say there are
> >> two request queues in the system q1 and q2 (lets say they belong to /dev/sda
> >> and /dev/sdb). Let say a task t1 in /cgroup/io/test1 is issueing io both
> >> for /dev/sda and /dev/sdb.
> >>
> >> bio_cgroup belonging to /cgroup/io/test1 will have two sub bio_group
> >> objects, say bio_group1 and bio_group2. bio_group1 will be in q1's rb-tree
> >> and bio_group2 will be in q2's rb-tree. bio_group1 will contain a list of
> >> bios issued by task t1 for /dev/sda and bio_group2 will contain a list of
> >> bios issued by task t1 for /dev/sdb. I thought the same can be extended
> >> for stacked devices also.
> >>   
> >> I am still trying to implementing it and hopefully this is doable idea.
> >> I think at the end of the day it will be something very close to dm-ioband
> >> algorithm just that there will be no lvm driver and no notion of separate
> >> dm-ioband device. 
> > 
> > Vivek, thanks for the detailed explanation. Only a comment. I guess, if
> > we don't change also the per-process optimizations/improvements made by
> > some IO scheduler, I think we can have undesirable behaviours.
> > 
> > For example: CFQ uses the per-process iocontext to improve fairness
> > between *all* the processes in a system. But it doesn't have the concept
> > that there's a cgroup context on-top-of the processes.
> > 
> > So, some optimizations made to guarantee fairness among processes could
> > conflict with algorithms implemented at the cgroup layer. And
> > potentially lead to undesirable behaviours.
> > 
> > For example an issue I'm experiencing with my cgroup-io-throttle
> > patchset is that a cgroup can consistently increase the IO rate (always
> > respecting the max limits), simply increasing the number of IO worker
> > tasks respect to another cgroup with a lower number of IO workers. This
> > is probably due to the fact the CFQ tries to give the same amount of
> > "IO time" to all the tasks, without considering that they're organized
> > in cgroup.
> 
> BTW this is why I proposed to use a single shared iocontext for all the
> processes running in the same cgroup. Anyway, this is not the best
> solution, because in this way all the IO requests coming from a cgroup
> will be queued to the same cfq queue. If I'm not wrong in this way we
> would implement noop (FIFO) between tasks belonging to the same cgroup
> and CFQ between cgroups. But, at least for this particular case, we
> would be able to provide fairness among cgroups.
> 
> -Andrea

I ever thought the same thing but this approach breaks the compatibility.
I think we should make ionice only effective for the processes in the
same cgroup.

A system gives some amount of bandwidths to its cgroups, and
the processes in one of the cgroups fairly share the given bandwidth.
I think this is the straight approach. What do you think?

I think all the CFQ-cgroup the NEC guys are working, OpenVZ team's CFQ
scheduler and dm-ioband with bio-cgroup work like this.

Thank you,
Hirokazu Takahashi.