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IO CPU affinity testing series
Hi, Here's a new round of patches to play with io cpu affinity. It can, as always, also be found in the block git repo. The branch name is 'io-cpu-affinity'. The major change since last post is the abandonment of the kthread approach. It was definitely slower then may 'add IPI to signal remote block softirq' hack. So I decided to base this on the scalable smp_call_function_single() that Nick posted. I tweaked it a bit to make it more suitable for my use and also faster. As for functionality, the only change is that I added a bio hint that the submitter can use to ask for completion on the same CPU that submitted the IO. Pass in BIO_CPU_AFFINE for that to occur. Otherwise the modes are the same as last time: - You can set a specific cpumask for queuing IO, and the block layer will move submitters to one of those CPUs. - You can set a specific cpumask for completion of IO, in which case the block layer will move the completion to one of those CPUs. - You can set rq_affinity mode, in which case IOs will always be completed on the CPU that submitted them. Look in /sys/block/<dev>/queue/ for the three sysfs variables that modify this behaviour. I'd be interested in getting some testing done on this, to see if it really helps the larger end of the scale. Dave, I know you have a lot of experience in this area and would appreciate your input and/or testing. I'm not sure if any of the above modes will allow you to do what you need for eg XFS - if you want all meta data IO completed on one (or a set of) CPU(s), then I can add a mode that will allow you to play with that. Or if something else, give me some input and we can take it from there! Patches are against latest -git. -- Jens Axboe |
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