Hi, Jens,

If you recall, I posted an RFC patch for this back in July of last year:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/7/13/279

The basic problem is that a process can issue a never-ending stream of
async direct I/Os to the same sector on a device, thus starving out
other I/O in the system (due to the way the alias handling works in both
cfq and deadline).  The solution I proposed back then was to start
dispatching from the fifo after a certain number of aliases had been
dispatched.  Vivek asked why we had to treat aliases differently at all,
and I never had a good answer.  So, I put together a simple patch which
allows aliases to be added to the rb tree (it adds them to the right,
though that doesn't matter as the order isn't guaranteed anyway).  I
think this is the preferred solution, as it doesn't break up time slices
in CFQ or batches in deadline.  I've tested it, and it does solve the
starvation issue.  Let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Jeff

Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

We don't need them anymore, so kill:

- REQ_ON_PLUG checks in various places
- !rq_mergeable() check in plug merging

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

Since for-2.6.40/core was forked off the 2.6.39 devel tree, we've
had churn in the core area that makes it difficult to handle
patches for eg cfq or blk-throttle. Instead of requiring that they
be based in older versions with bugs that have been fixed later
in the rc cycle, merge in 2.6.39 final.

Also fixes up conflicts in the below files.

Conflicts:
	drivers/block/paride/pcd.c
	drivers/cdrom/viocd.c
	drivers/ide/ide-cd.c

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

After the anticipatory scheduler was dropped, there was no need to
special-case the request_module string. As such, drop the redundant
sprintf and stack variable.

Signed-off-by: Kees Cook <kees.cook@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

The sort insert is the one that goes to the IO scheduler. With
the SORT_MERGE addition, we could bypass IO scheduler setup
but still ask the IO scheduler to insert the request. This would
cause an oops on switching IO schedulers through the sysfs
interface, unless the disk just happened to be idle while it
occured.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

Instead of overloading __blk_run_queue to force an offload to kblockd
add a new blk_run_queue_async helper to do it explicitly.  I've kept
the blk_queue_stopped check for now, but I suspect it's not needed
as the check we do when the workqueue items runs should be enough.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

Merge it with __elv_add_request(), it's pretty pointless to
have a function with only two callers. The main interface
is elv_add_request()/__elv_add_request().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

One of the disadvantages of on-stack plugging is that we potentially
lose out on merging since all pending IO isn't always visible to
everybody. When we flush the on-stack plugs, right now we don't do
any checks to see if potential merge candidates could be utilized.

Correct this by adding a new insert variant, ELEVATOR_INSERT_SORT_MERGE.
It works just ELEVATOR_INSERT_SORT, but first checks whether we can
merge with an existing request before doing the insertion (if we fail
merging).

This fixes a regression with multiple processes issuing IO that
can be merged.

Thanks to Shaohua Li <shaohua.li@intel.com> for testing and fixing
an accounting bug.

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

Conflicts:
	block/blk-core.c
	block/blk-flush.c
	drivers/md/raid1.c
	drivers/md/raid10.c
	drivers/md/raid5.c
	fs/nilfs2/btnode.c
	fs/nilfs2/mdt.c

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

Code has been converted over to the new explicit on-stack plugging,
and delay users have been converted to use the new API for that.
So lets kill off the old plugging along with aops->sync_page().

Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>