On Mon, 3 Apr 2017, 12:29am, Hannes Reinecke wrote: > On 04/03/2017 08:37 AM, Arun Easi wrote: > > Hi Folks, > > > > I would like to seek your input on a few topics on SCSI / block > > multi-queue. > > > > 1. Tag# generation. > > > > The context is with SCSI MQ on. My question is, what should a LLD do to > > get request tag values in the range 0 through can_queue - 1 across *all* > > of the queues. In our QLogic 41XXX series of adapters, we have a per > > session submit queue, a shared task memory (shared across all queues) and > > N completion queues (separate MSI-X vectors). We report N as the > > nr_hw_queues. I would like to, if possible, use the block layer tags to > > index into the above shared task memory area. > > > > From looking at the scsi/block source, it appears that when a LLD reports > > a value say #C, in can_queue (via scsi_host_template), that value is used > > as the max depth when corresponding block layer queues are created. So, > > while SCSI restricts the number of commands to LLD at #C, the request tag > > generated across any of the queues can range from 0..#C-1. Please correct > > me if I got this wrong. > > > > If the above is true, then for a LLD to get tag# within it's max-tasks > > range, it has to report max-tasks / number-of-hw-queues in can_queue, and > > in the I/O path, use the tag and hwq# to arrive at a index# to use. This, > > though, leads to a poor use of tag resources -- queue reaching it's > > capacity while LLD can still take it. > > > Yep. > > > blk_mq_unique_tag() would not work here, because it just puts the hwq# in > > the upper 16 bits, which need not fall in the max-tasks range. > > > > Perhaps the current MQ model is to cater to a queue pair > > (submit/completion) kind of hardware model; nevertheless I would like to > > know how other hardware variants can makes use of it. > > > He. Welcome to the club. > > Shared tag sets continue to dog the block-mq on 'legacy' (ie non-NVMe) > HBAs. ATM the only 'real' solution to this problem is indeed have a > static split of the entire tag space by the number of hardware queues. > With the mentioned tag-starvation problem. > > If we were to continue with the tag to hardware ID mapping, we would > need to implement a dynamic tag space mapping onto hardware queues. > My idea to that would be to map the entire tag space, but rather the > individual bit words onto the hardware queue. Then we could make the > mapping dynamic, where there individual words are mapped onto the queues > only as needed. > However, the _one_ big problem we're facing here is timeouts. > With the 1:1 mapping between tags and hardware IDs we can only re-use > the tag once the timeout is _definitely_ resolved. But this means > the command will be active, and we cannot return blk_mq_complete() until > the timeout itself has been resolved. > With FC this essentially means until the corresponding XIDs are safe to > re-use, ie after all ABRT/RRQ etc processing has been completed. > Hence we totally lose the ability to return the command itself with > -ETIMEDOUT and continue with I/O processing even though the original XID > is still being held by firmware. > > In the light of this I wonder if it wouldn't be better to completely > decouple block-layer tags and hardware IDs, and have an efficient > algorithm mapping the block-layer tags onto hardware IDs. > That should avoid the arbitrary tag starvation problem, and would allow > us to handle timeouts efficiently. > Of course, we don't _have_ such an efficient algorithm; maybe it's time > to have a generic one within the kernel as quite some drivers would > _love_ to just use the generic implementation here. > (qla2xxx, lpfc, fcoe, mpt3sas etc all suffer from the same problem) > > > 2. mq vs non-mq performance gain. > > > > This is more like a poll, I guess. I was wondering what performance gains > > folks are observing with SCSI MQ on. I saw Christoph H.'s slide deck that > > has one slide that shows a 200k IOPS gain. > > > > From my testing, though, I was not lucky to observe that big of a change. > > In fact, the difference was not even noticeable(*). For e.g., for 512 > > bytes random read test, in both cases, gave me in the vicinity of 2M IOPs. > > When I say both cases, I meant, one with scsi_mod's use_blk_mq set to 0 > > and another with 1 (LLD is reloaded when it is done). I only used one NUMA > > node for this run. The test was run on a x86_64 setup. > > > You _really_ should have listened to my talk at VAULT.
Would you have a slide deck / minutes that could be shared? > For 'legacy' HBAs there indeed is not much of a performance gain to be > had; the max gain is indeed for heavy parallel I/O. I have multiple devices (I-T nexuses) in my setup, so definitely there are parallel I/Os. > And there even is a scheduler issue when running with a single > submission thread; there I've measured a performance _drop_ by up to > 50%. Which, as Jens claims, really looks like a block-layer issue rather > than a generic problem. > > > > * See item 3 for a special handling. > > > > 3. add_random slowness. > > > > One thing I observed with MQ on and off was this block layer tunable, > > add_random, which as I understand is to tune disk entropy contribution. > > With non-MQ, it is turned on, and with MQ, it is turned off by default. > > > > This got noticed because, when I was running multi-port testing, there was > > a big drop in IOPs with and without MQ (~200K IOPS to 1M+ IOPs when the > > test ran on same NUMA node / across NUMA nodes). > > > > Just wondering why we have it ON on one setting and OFF on another. > > > > Sorry for the rather long e-mail, but your comments/thoughts are much > > appreciated. > > > You definitely want to use the automatic IRQ-affinity patches from > Christoph; that proved to be a major gain in high-performance setups (eg > when running off an all-flash array). That change is not yet present in the driver. I was using irqbalance (oneshot) / custom-script to try out various MSI-X vector to CPU mapping in the mean time. Regards, -Arun > > Overall, I'm very much interested in these topics; let's continue with > the discussion to figure out what the best approach here might be. > > Cheers, > > Hannes >
