writeback: throttle buffered writebackwb-buf-throttle-v5

Test patch that throttles 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.

The patch registers two sysfs entries. The first one, 'wb_window_usec',
defines the window of monitoring. The second one, 'wb_lat_usec',
sets the latency target for the window. 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 these settings.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@fb.com>

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
index dce25d848d92..9bc990abef4d 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
@@ -151,5 +151,18 @@ device state. This means that it might not be safe to toggle the
 setting from "write back" to "write through", since that will also
 eliminate cache flushes issued by the kernel.
 
+wb_lat_usec (RW)
+----------------
+If the device is registered for writeback throttling, then this file shows
+the target minimum read latency. If this latency is exceeded in a given
+window of time (see wb_window_usec), then the writeback throttling will start
+scaling back writes.
+
+wb_window_usec (RW)
+-------------------
+If the device is registered for writeback throttling, then this file shows
+the value of the monitoring window in which we'll look at the target
+latency. See wb_lat_usec.
+
 
 Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>, February 2009