A set of processes may happen to perform interleaved reads, i.e.,requests
whose union would give rise to a sequential read pattern. There are two
typical cases: in the first case, processes read fixed-size chunks of
data at a fixed distance from each other, while in the second case processes
may read variable-size chunks at variable distances. The latter case occurs
for example with QEMU, which splits the I/O generated by the guest into
multiple chunks, and lets these chunks be served by a pool of cooperating
processes, iteratively assigning the next chunk of I/O to the first
available process. CFQ uses actual queue merging for the first type of
rocesses, whereas it uses preemption to get a sequential read pattern out
of the read requests performed by the second type of processes. In the end
it uses two different mechanisms to achieve the same goal: boosting the
throughput with interleaved I/O.
This patch introduces Early Queue Merge (EQM), a unified mechanism to get a
sequential read pattern with both types of processes. The main idea is
checking newly arrived requests against the next request of the active queue
both in case of actual request insert and in case of request merge. By doing
so, both the types of processes can be handled by just merging their queues.
EQM is then simpler and more compact than the pair of mechanisms used in
CFQ.
Finally, EQM also preserves the typical low-latency properties of BFQ, by
properly restoring the weight-raising state of a queue when it gets back to
a non-merged state.
Change-Id: I31d48c463273603c6c49ec675c7a524a6937da2a
Signed-off-by: Mauro Andreolini <mauro.andreolini@unimore.it>
Signed-off-by: Arianna Avanzini <avanzini.arianna@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@unimore.it>
78b11b701c