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>

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>

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>

This patch adds support for creating a queuing context outside
of the queue itself. This enables us to batch up pieces of IO
before grabbing the block device queue lock and submitting them to
the IO scheduler.

The context is created on the stack of the process and assigned in
the task structure, so that we can auto-unplug it if we hit a schedule
event.

The current queue plugging happens implicitly if IO is submitted to
an empty device, yet callers have to remember to unplug that IO when
they are going to wait for it. This is an ugly API and has caused bugs
in the past. Additionally, it requires hacks in the vm (->sync_page()
callback) to handle that logic. By switching to an explicit plugging
scheme we make the API a lot nicer and can get rid of the ->sync_page()
hack in the vm.

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

Conflicts:
	block/cfq-iosched.c

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

The current FLUSH/FUA support has evolved from the implementation
which had to perform queue draining.  As such, sequencing is done
queue-wide one flush request after another.  However, with the
draining requirement gone, there's no reason to keep the queue-wide
sequential approach.

This patch reimplements FLUSH/FUA support such that each FLUSH/FUA
request is sequenced individually.  The actual FLUSH execution is
double buffered and whenever a request wants to execute one for either
PRE or POSTFLUSH, it queues on the pending queue.  Once certain
conditions are met, a flush request is issued and on its completion
all pending requests proceed to the next sequence.

This allows arbitrary merging of different type of flushes.  How they
are merged can be primarily controlled and tuned by adjusting the
above said 'conditions' used to determine when to issue the next
flush.

This is inspired by Darrick's patches to merge multiple zero-data
flushes which helps workloads with highly concurrent fsync requests.

* As flush requests are never put on the IO scheduler, request fields
  used for flush share space with rq->rb_node.  rq->completion_data is
  moved out of the union.  This increases the request size by one
  pointer.

  As rq->elevator_private* are used only by the iosched too, it is
  possible to reduce the request size further.  However, to do that,
  we need to modify request allocation path such that iosched data is
  not allocated for flush requests.

* FLUSH/FUA processing happens on insertion now instead of dispatch.

- Comments updated as per Vivek and Mike.

Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Cc: "Darrick J. Wong" <djwong@us.ibm.com>
Cc: Shaohua Li <shli@kernel.org>
Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Cc: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Cc: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>

__get_cpu_var() can be replaced with this_cpu_read and will then use a
single read instruction with implied address calculation to access the
correct per cpu instance.

However, the address of a per cpu variable passed to __this_cpu_read()
cannot be determined (since it's an implied address conversion through
segment prefixes).  Therefore apply this only to uses of __get_cpu_var
where the address of the variable is not used.

Cc: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
Cc: Hugh Dickins <hughd@google.com>
Cc: Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>
Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com>
Signed-off-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>

This reverts commit 7681bfeeccff5efa9eb29bf09249a3c400b15327.

Conflicts:

	include/linux/genhd.h

It has numerous issues with the cleanup path and non-elevator
devices. Revert it for now so we can come up with a clean
version without rushing things.

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

* 'for-2.6.37/core' of git://git.kernel.dk/linux-2.6-block: (39 commits)
  cfq-iosched: Fix a gcc 4.5 warning and put some comments
  block: Turn bvec_k{un,}map_irq() into static inline functions
  block: fix accounting bug on cross partition merges
  block: Make the integrity mapped property a bio flag
  block: Fix double free in blk_integrity_unregister
  block: Ensure physical block size is unsigned int
  blkio-throttle: Fix possible multiplication overflow in iops calculations
  blkio-throttle: limit max iops value to UINT_MAX
  blkio-throttle: There is no need to convert jiffies to milli seconds
  blkio-throttle: Fix link failure failure on i386
  blkio: Recalculate the throttled bio dispatch time upon throttle limit change
  blkio: Add root group to td->tg_list
  blkio: deletion of a cgroup was causes oops
  blkio: Do not export throttle files if CONFIG_BLK_DEV_THROTTLING=n
  block: set the bounce_pfn to the actual DMA limit rather than to max memory
  block: revert bad fix for memory hotplug causing bounces
  Fix compile error in blk-exec.c for !CONFIG_DETECT_HUNG_TASK
  block: set the bounce_pfn to the actual DMA limit rather than to max memory
  block: Prevent hang_check firing during long I/O
  cfq: improve fsync performance for small files
  ...

Fix up trivial conflicts due to __rcu sparse annotation in include/linux/genhd.h