Many throughput-sensitive workloads are made of several parallel I/O
flows, with all flows generated by the same application, or more
generically by the same task (e.g., system boot). The most
counterproductive action with these workloads is plugging I/O dispatch
when one of the bfq_queues associated with these flows remains
temporarily empty.

To avoid this plugging, BFQ has been using a burst-handling mechanism
for years now. This mechanism has proven effective for throughput, and
not detrimental for service guarantees. This commit pushes this
mechanism a little bit further, basing on the following two facts.

First, all the I/O flows of a the same application or task contribute
to the execution/completion of that common application or task. So the
performance figures that matter are total throughput of the flows and
task-wide I/O latency.  In particular, these flows do not need to be
protected from each other, in terms of individual bandwidth or
latency.

Second, the above fact holds regardless of the number of flows.

Putting these two facts together, this commits merges stably the
bfq_queues associated with these I/O flows, i.e., with the processes
that generate these IO/ flows, regardless of how many the involved
processes are.

To decide whether a set of bfq_queues is actually associated with the
I/O flows of a common application or task, and to merge these queues
stably, this commit operates as follows: given a bfq_queue, say Q2,
currently being created, and the last bfq_queue, say Q1, created
before Q2, Q2 is merged stably with Q1 if
- very little time has elapsed since when Q1 was created
- Q2 has the same ioprio as Q1
- Q2 belongs to the same group as Q1

Merging bfq_queues also reduces scheduling overhead. A fio test with
ten random readers on /dev/nullb shows a throughput boost of 40%, with
a quadcore. Since BFQ's execution time amounts to ~50% of the total
per-request processing time, the above throughput boost implies that
BFQ's overhead is reduced by more than 50%.

Tested-by: Jan Kara <jack@suse.cz>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20210304174627.161-7-paolo.valente@linaro.org


Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>