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In order to maintain sequential write patterns per zone with zoned block
devices, zone write plugging issues only a single write BIO per zone at
any time. This works well but has the side effect that when large
sequential write streams are issued by the user and these streams cross
zone boundaries, the device ends up receiving a discontiguous set of
write commands for different zones. The same also happens when a user
writes simultaneously at high queue depth multiple zones: the device
does not see all sequential writes per zone and receives discontiguous
writes to different zones. While this does not affect the performance of
solid state zoned block devices, when using an SMR HDD, this pattern
change from sequential writes to discontiguous writes to different zones
significantly increases head seek which results in degraded write
throughput.
In order to reduce this seek overhead for rotational media devices,
introduce a per disk zone write plugs kernel thread to issue all write
BIOs to zones. This single zone write issuing context is enabled for
any zoned block device that has a request queue flagged with the new
QUEUE_ZONED_QD1_WRITES flag.
The flag QUEUE_ZONED_QD1_WRITES is visible as the sysfs queue attribute
zoned_qd1_writes for zoned devices. For regular block devices, this
attribute is not visible. For zoned block devices, a user can override
the default value set to force the global write maximum queue depth of
1 for a zoned block device, or clear this attribute to fallback to the
default behavior of zone write plugging which limits writes to QD=1 per
sequential zone.
Writing to a zoned block device flagged with QUEUE_ZONED_QD1_WRITES is
implemented using a list of zone write plugs that have a non-empty BIO
list. Listed zone write plugs are processed by the disk zone write plugs
worker kthread in FIFO order, and all BIOs of a zone write plug are all
processed before switching to the next listed zone write plug. A newly
submitted BIO for a non-FULL zone write plug that is not yet listed
causes the addition of the zone write plug at the end of the disk list
of zone write plugs.
Since the write BIOs queued in a zone write plug BIO list are
necessarilly sequential, for rotational media, using the single zone
write plugs kthread to issue all BIOs maintains a sequential write
pattern and thus reduces seek overhead and improves write throughput.
This processing essentially result in always writing to HDDs at QD=1,
which is not an issue for HDDs operating with write caching enabled.
Performance with write cache disabled is also not degraded thanks to
the efficient write handling of modern SMR HDDs.
A disk list of zone write plugs is defined using the new struct gendisk
zone_wplugs_list, and accesses to this list is protected using the
zone_wplugs_list_lock spinlock. The per disk kthread
(zone_wplugs_worker) code is implemented by the function
disk_zone_wplugs_worker(). A reference on listed zone write plugs is
always held until all BIOs of the zone write plug are processed by the
worker kthread. BIO issuing at QD=1 is driven using a completion
structure (zone_wplugs_worker_bio_done) and calls to blk_io_wait().
With this change, performance when sequentially writing the zones of a
30 TB SMR SATA HDD connected to an AHCI adapter changes as follows
(1MiB direct I/Os, results in MB/s unit):
+--------------------+
| Write BW (MB/s) |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| Sequential write | Baseline | Patched |
| Queue Depth | 6.19-rc8 | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 1 | 244 | 245 |
| 2 | 244 | 245 |
| 4 | 245 | 245 |
| 8 | 242 | 245 |
| 16 | 222 | 246 |
| 32 | 211 | 245 |
| 64 | 193 | 244 |
| 128 | 112 | 246 |
+------------------+----------+---------+
With the current code (baseline), as the sequential write stream crosses
a zone boundary, higher queue depth creates a gap between the
last IO to the previous zone and the first IOs to the following zones,
causing head seeks and degrading performance. Using the disk zone
write plugs worker thread, this pattern disappears and the maximum
throughput of the drive is maintained, leading to over 100%
improvements in throughput for high queue depth write.
Using 16 fio jobs all writing to randomly chosen zones at QD=32 with 1
MiB direct IOs, write throughput also increases significantly.
+--------------------+
| Write BW (MB/s) |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| Random write | Baseline | Patched |
| Number of zones | 6.19-rc7 | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 1 | 191 | 192 |
| 2 | 101 | 128 |
| 4 | 115 | 123 |
| 8 | 90 | 120 |
| 16 | 64 | 115 |
| 32 | 58 | 105 |
| 64 | 56 | 101 |
| 128 | 55 | 99 |
+------------------+----------+---------+
Tests using XFS shows that buffered write speed with 8 jobs writing
files increases by 12% to 35% depending on the workload.
+--------------------+
| Write BW (MB/s) |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| Workload | Baseline | Patched |
| | 6.19-rc7 | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 256MiB file size | 212 | 238 |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 4MiB .. 128 MiB | 213 | 243 |
| random file size | | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 2MiB .. 8 MiB | 179 | 242 |
| random file size | | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
Performance gains are even more significant when using an HBA that
limits the maximum size of commands to a small value, e.g. HBAs
controlled with the mpi3mr driver limit commands to a maximum of 1 MiB.
In such case, the write throughput gains are over 40%.
+--------------------+
| Write BW (MB/s) |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| Workload | Baseline | Patched |
| | 6.19-rc7 | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 256MiB file size | 175 | 245 |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 4MiB .. 128 MiB | 174 | 244 |
| random file size | | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
| 2MiB .. 8 MiB | 171 | 243 |
| random file size | | |
+------------------+----------+---------+
Signed-off-by: Damien Le Moal <dlemoal@kernel.org>
Reviewed-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Reviewed-by: Bart Van Assche <bvanassche@acm.org>
Reviewed-by: Johannes Thumshirn <johannes.thumshirn@wdc.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
Linux kernel ============ The Linux kernel is the core of any Linux operating system. It manages hardware, system resources, and provides the fundamental services for all other software. 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