Re: [Qemu-devel] 4k seq read splitting for virtio-blk - possible workarounds?

[Paolo Bonzini]

On 26/10/2015 17:43, Andrey Korolyov wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 7:37 PM, Paolo Bonzini <address@hidden> wrote:
>> On 26/10/2015 17:31, Andrey Korolyov wrote:
>>>> the virtio block device is always splitting a single read
>>>> range request to 4k ones, bringing the overall performance of the
>>>> sequential reads far below virtio-scsi.
>>>>
>>>> How does the blktrace look like in the guest?
>>>
>>> Yep, thanks for suggestion. It looks now like a pure driver issue:
>>>
>>>  Reads Queued:       11008,    44032KiB  Writes Queued:           0,        
>>> 0KiB
>>>  Read Dispatches:    11008,    44032KiB  Write Dispatches:        0,        
>>> 0KiB
>>>
>>> vs
>>>
>>>  Reads Queued:      185728,   742912KiB  Writes Queued:           0,        
>>> 0KiB
>>>  Read Dispatches:     2902,   742912KiB  Write Dispatches:        0,        
>>> 0KiB
>>>
>>> Because guest virtio-blk driver lacks *any* blk scheduler management,
>>> this is kinda logical. Requests for scsi backend are dispatched in
>>                                                        ^^^^^^^^^^
>>
>> queued you mean?
>>
>>> single block-sized chunks as well, but they are mostly merged by a
>>> scheduler before being passed to the device layer. Could be there any
>>> improvements over the situation except writing an underlay b/w virtio
>>> emulator backend and the real storage?
>>
>> This is probably the fall-out of converting the virtio-blk to use
>> blk-mq, which was premature to say the least.  Jeff Moyer was working on
>> it, but I'm not sure if this has been merged.  Andrey, what kernel are
>> you using?
> 
> Queued, sorry for honest mistype, guest kernel is a 3.16.x from
> jessie, so regular blk-mq is there. Any point of interest for trying
> something newer? And of course I didn`t thought about something older,
> will try against 3.10 now.

Yes, it makes sense to try both something older and something newer.  I
found this:

    commit e6c4438ba7cb615448492849970aaf0aaa1cc973
    Author: Jeff Moyer <address@hidden>
    Date:   Fri May 8 10:51:30 2015 -0700

    blk-mq: fix plugging in blk_sq_make_request

Looking at the meat of the patch, we have:

        const int is_sync = rw_is_sync(bio->bi_rw);
        const int is_flush_fua = bio->bi_rw & (REQ_FLUSH | REQ_FUA);
-       unsigned int use_plug, request_count = 0;
+       struct blk_plug *plug;
+       unsigned int request_count = 0;
        struct blk_map_ctx data;
        struct request *rq;

-       /*
-        * If we have multiple hardware queues, just go directly to
-        * one of those for sync IO.
-        */
-       use_plug = !is_flush_fua && !is_sync;

For reads rw_is_sync returns true, hence use_plug is always false.  So
4.2 kernels could fix this issue.

Paolo