[LSF/MM TOPIC][LSF/MM ATTEND] NAPI polling for block drivers

[Johannes Thumshirn]

On Tue, Jan 17, 2017 at 05:45:53PM +0200, Sagi Grimberg wrote:
> 
> >--
> >[1]
> >queue = b'nvme0q1'
> >     usecs               : count     distribution
> >         0 -> 1          : 7310 |****************************************|
> >         2 -> 3          : 11       |      |
> >         4 -> 7          : 10       |      |
> >         8 -> 15         : 20       |      |
> >        16 -> 31         : 0        |      |
> >        32 -> 63         : 0        |      |
> >        64 -> 127        : 1        |      |
> >
> >[2]
> >queue = b'nvme0q1'
> >     usecs               : count     distribution
> >         0 -> 1          : 7309 |****************************************|
> >         2 -> 3          : 14       |      |
> >         4 -> 7          : 7        |      |
> >         8 -> 15         : 17       |      |
> >
> 
> Rrr, email made the histograms look funky (tabs vs. spaces...)
> The count is what's important anyways...
> 
> Just adding that I used an Intel P3500 nvme device.
> 
> >We can see that most of the time our latency is pretty good (<1ns) but with
> >huge tail latencies (some 8-15 ns and even one in 32-63 ns).
> 
> Obviously is micro-seconds and not nano-seconds (I wish...)

So to share yesterday's (and today's) findings:

On AHCI I see only one completion polled as well.

This probably is because in contrast to networking (with NAPI) in the block
layer we do have a link between submission and completion whereas in networking
RX and TX are decoupled. So if we're sending out one request we get the
completion for it.

What we'd need is a link to know "we've sent 10 requests out, now poll for the
10 completions after the 1st IRQ". So basically what NVMe already did with
calling __nvme_process_cq() after submission. Maybe we should even disable
IRQs when submitting and re-enable after submitting so the
submission patch doesn't get preempted by a completion.

Does this make sense?

Byte,
	Johannes

-- 
Johannes Thumshirn                                          Storage
jthumshirn at suse.de                                +49 911 74053 689
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