Re: [PATCH] Adding multiple workers to the loop device.

From: Jens Axboe
Date: Thu Jan 23 2020 - 14:02:10 EST


On 1/23/20 11:59 AM, Jens Axboe wrote:
> On 1/21/20 12:25 PM, muraliraja.muniraju wrote:
>> Current loop device implementation has a single kthread worker and
>> drains one request at a time to completion. If the underneath device is
>> slow then this reduces the concurrency significantly. To help in these
>> cases, adding multiple loop workers increases the concurrency. Also to
>> retain the old behaviour the default number of loop workers is 1 and can
>> be tuned via the ioctl.
>
> Have you considered using blk-mq for this? Right now loop just does
> some basic checks and then queues for a thread. If you bump nr_hw_queues
> up (provide a parameter for that) and set BLK_MQ_F_BLOCKING in the
> tag flags, then that might be a more viable approach for handling this.

Then you could also dump cmd->work, which would shrink loop_cmd by more
than 1/3rd.

--
Jens Axboe