Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sat, 28 Dec 2019 08:40:35 -0000
From:      Luigi Rizzo <rizzo@iet.unipi.it>
To:        Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
Cc:        Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>, Alexander Motin <mav@freebsd.org>, Luigi Rizzo <luigi@freebsd.org>, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org>, "freebsd-geom@FreeBSD.org" <freebsd-geom@freebsd.org>,  "Conrad E. Meyer" <cem@freebsd.org>, "Andrey V. Elsukov" <ae@freebsd.org>,  "freebsd-arch@freebsd.org" <freebsd-arch@freebsd.org>, Warner Losh <imp@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: [Probabile SPF]Re: gsched: modernize or remove?
Message-ID:  <CA%2BhQ2%2Bh_QErGEr-q5UAFS_W43nYGSG%2BgB2LG%2BHN6tQwnEicUPw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <22559.1577484040@critter.freebsd.dk>
References:  <6d466360-988f-e80d-3212-b6c479a5ec03@FreeBSD.org> <CANCZdfovCe1UQmC%2B94QK5P-imLEBygoyQLDqNSdDPeYryoL=bA@mail.gmail.com> <22559.1577484040@critter.freebsd.dk>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 2:00 PM Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
wrote:

> --------
> In message <CANCZdfovCe1UQmC+94QK5P-imLEBygoyQLDqNSdDPeYryoL=
> bA@mail.gmail.com>
> , Warner Losh writes:
> >On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 10:53 AM Alexander Motin <mav@freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> As I can see, gsched code was not really maintained for the last 10
> >> years since being added.
> ...
> >> So my question is: does it make sense to try fix/modernize it, or it
> >> just be easier to remove it?  Does anybody still use it, or see some
> >> future for it?
>
> Gsched was always a weird thing IMO.
>
> I was happy to see that you could do stuff like that with GEOM, but
> for the life of me I could never figure out why you would want to
> do it with GEOM which is a very low-information environment when
> it comes to scheduling decisions.
>
> I belive the original inspiration was "Anticipatory disk-scheduling"
> which tries to mitigate some starvation issues which you can have
> with a normal elevator disksort on systems with very few ioreq
> sources[1].
>
> With SSDs all but having erased seek-time from the surface of the
> planet, and huge caches in drives, controllers and pretty much
> everywhere else people have been able to squeeze one in, it is not
> even obvious to me if it makes sense to have any disksort in the
> first place[2], much less gssched.
>

phk's summary is perfectly accurate. the practical motivation
at the time was to make sure that svn operations and streaming
I/O would not kill each other, but since we all switched to SSDs
there is no use case anymore and so I am ok with removing gsched.

As to why it was in geom rather than elsewhere: that was a very
convenient place to do scheduling in a generic way, rather than
replicate it in scsi/hdd/other lower level drivers.

cheers
luigi



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?CA%2BhQ2%2Bh_QErGEr-q5UAFS_W43nYGSG%2BgB2LG%2BHN6tQwnEicUPw>