block, bfq: always protect newly-created queues from existing active queues

If many bfq_queues belonging to the same group happen to be created
shortly after each other, then the processes associated with these
queues have typically a common goal. In particular, bursts of queue
creations are usually caused by services or applications that spawn
many parallel threads/processes. Examples are systemd during boot, or
git grep. If there are no other active queues, then, to help these
processes get their job done as soon as possible, the best thing to do
is to reach a high throughput. To this goal, it is usually better to
not grant either weight-raising or device idling to the queues
associated with these processes. And this is exactly what BFQ
currently does.

There is however a drawback: if, in contrast, some other queues are
already active, then the newly created queues must be protected from
the I/O flowing through the already existing queues. In this case, the
best thing to do is the opposite as in the other case: it is much
better to grant weight-raising and device idling to the newly-created
queues, if they deserve it. This commit addresses this issue by doing
so if there are already other active queues.

This change also helps eliminating false positives, which occur when
the newly-created queues do not belong to an actual large burst of
creations, but some background task (e.g., a service) happens to
trigger the creation of new queues in the middle, i.e., very close to
when the victim queues are created. These false positive may cause
total loss of control on process latencies.

Tested-by: Holger Hoffstätte <holger@applied-asynchrony.com>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions