iosched: prevent aliased requests from starving other I/O

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>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 7 deletions

diff --git a/block/cfq-iosched.c b/block/cfq-iosched.c
index 7c52d6888924..a2fb14bb1402 100644
--- a/block/cfq-iosched.c
+++ b/block/cfq-iosched.c
@@ -1501,16 +1501,11 @@ static void cfq_add_rq_rb(struct request *rq)
 {
 	struct cfq_queue *cfqq = RQ_CFQQ(rq);
 	struct cfq_data *cfqd = cfqq->cfqd;
-	struct request *__alias, *prev;
+	struct request *prev;
 
 	cfqq->queued[rq_is_sync(rq)]++;
 
-	/*
-	 * looks a little odd, but the first insert might return an alias.
-	 * if that happens, put the alias on the dispatch list
-	 */
-	while ((__alias = elv_rb_add(&cfqq->sort_list, rq)) != NULL)
-		cfq_dispatch_insert(cfqd->queue, __alias);
+	elv_rb_add(&cfqq->sort_list, rq);
 
 	if (!cfq_cfqq_on_rr(cfqq))
 		cfq_add_cfqq_rr(cfqd, cfqq);