76 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
76 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
Deadline IO scheduler tunables
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==============================
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This little file attempts to document how the deadline io scheduler works.
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In particular, it will clarify the meaning of the exposed tunables that may be
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of interest to power users.
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Selecting IO schedulers
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-----------------------
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Refer to Documentation/block/switching-sched.txt for information on
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selecting an io scheduler on a per-device basis.
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********************************************************************************
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read_expire (in ms)
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-----------
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The goal of the deadline io scheduler is to attempt to guarantee a start
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service time for a request. As we focus mainly on read latencies, this is
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tunable. When a read request first enters the io scheduler, it is assigned
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a deadline that is the current time + the read_expire value in units of
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milliseconds.
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write_expire (in ms)
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-----------
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Similar to read_expire mentioned above, but for writes.
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fifo_batch (number of requests)
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----------
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Requests are grouped into ``batches'' of a particular data direction (read or
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write) which are serviced in increasing sector order. To limit extra seeking,
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deadline expiries are only checked between batches. fifo_batch controls the
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maximum number of requests per batch.
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This parameter tunes the balance between per-request latency and aggregate
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throughput. When low latency is the primary concern, smaller is better (where
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a value of 1 yields first-come first-served behaviour). Increasing fifo_batch
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generally improves throughput, at the cost of latency variation.
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writes_starved (number of dispatches)
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--------------
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When we have to move requests from the io scheduler queue to the block
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device dispatch queue, we always give a preference to reads. However, we
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don't want to starve writes indefinitely either. So writes_starved controls
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how many times we give preference to reads over writes. When that has been
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done writes_starved number of times, we dispatch some writes based on the
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same criteria as reads.
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front_merges (bool)
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------------
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Sometimes it happens that a request enters the io scheduler that is contiguous
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with a request that is already on the queue. Either it fits in the back of that
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request, or it fits at the front. That is called either a back merge candidate
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or a front merge candidate. Due to the way files are typically laid out,
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back merges are much more common than front merges. For some work loads, you
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may even know that it is a waste of time to spend any time attempting to
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front merge requests. Setting front_merges to 0 disables this functionality.
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Front merges may still occur due to the cached last_merge hint, but since
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that comes at basically 0 cost we leave that on. We simply disable the
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rbtree front sector lookup when the io scheduler merge function is called.
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Nov 11 2002, Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
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