cfq-iosched: Documentation help for new tunables

Some documentation to provide help with tunables.

Signed-off-by: Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@redhat.com>
Acked-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jaxboe@fusionio.com>
This commit is contained in:
Vivek Goyal
2010-08-23 12:25:29 +02:00
committed by Jens Axboe
parent c4e7893ebc
commit 6d6ac1c1a3
2 changed files with 73 additions and 0 deletions

View File

@@ -217,6 +217,7 @@ Details of cgroup files
CFQ sysfs tunable
=================
/sys/block/<disk>/queue/iosched/group_isolation
-----------------------------------------------
If group_isolation=1, it provides stronger isolation between groups at the
expense of throughput. By default group_isolation is 0. In general that
@@ -243,6 +244,33 @@ By default one should run with group_isolation=0. If that is not sufficient
and one wants stronger isolation between groups, then set group_isolation=1
but this will come at cost of reduced throughput.
/sys/block/<disk>/queue/iosched/slice_idle
------------------------------------------
On a faster hardware CFQ can be slow, especially with sequential workload.
This happens because CFQ idles on a single queue and single queue might not
drive deeper request queue depths to keep the storage busy. In such scenarios
one can try setting slice_idle=0 and that would switch CFQ to IOPS
(IO operations per second) mode on NCQ supporting hardware.
That means CFQ will not idle between cfq queues of a cfq group and hence be
able to driver higher queue depth and achieve better throughput. That also
means that cfq provides fairness among groups in terms of IOPS and not in
terms of disk time.
/sys/block/<disk>/queue/iosched/group_idle
------------------------------------------
If one disables idling on individual cfq queues and cfq service trees by
setting slice_idle=0, group_idle kicks in. That means CFQ will still idle
on the group in an attempt to provide fairness among groups.
By default group_idle is same as slice_idle and does not do anything if
slice_idle is enabled.
One can experience an overall throughput drop if you have created multiple
groups and put applications in that group which are not driving enough
IO to keep disk busy. In that case set group_idle=0, and CFQ will not idle
on individual groups and throughput should improve.
What works
==========
- Currently only sync IO queues are support. All the buffered writes are