Re: [PATCH] Give kjournald a IOPRIO_CLASS_RT io priority

From: Dave Chinner
Date: Thu Oct 02 2008 - 19:59:08 EST


On Thu, Oct 02, 2008 at 02:37:13PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Thu, 2 Oct 2008 21:22:23 +0200 Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Can we agree on this patch?
>
> This change will cause _all_ kjournald writeout to have elevated
> priority. The majority of that writeout (in data=ordered mode) is file
> data, which we didn't intend to change.
>
> The risk here is that this will *worsen* latency for plain old read(),
> because now kjournald writeout will be favoured.
>
> There is in fact a good argument for _reducing_ kjournald's IO
> priority, not increasing it!
>
> A better approach might be to mark the relevant buffers/bios as needing
> higher priority at submit_bh() time (if that's possible). At least
> that way we don't accidentally elevate the priority of the bulk data.

You can do that for submit_bio() by calling bio_set_prio() before
submision - I did that for elevating only the XFS journal I/O.
submit_bh() doesn't have any way of passing a priority through to it
right now...

I should resurrect the XFS patches I had an retest them....

Cheers,

Dave.
--
Dave Chinner
david@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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