[dm-devel] blk-mq request allocation stalls [was: Re: [PATCH v3 0/8] dm: add request-based blk-mq support]

[Mike Snitzer]

On Wed, Jan 07 2015 at 10:32am -0500,
Jens Axboe <axboe at kernel.dk> wrote:

> On 01/07/2015 03:33 AM, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> >On 01/06/15 17:15, Jens Axboe wrote:
> >>blk-mq request allocation is pretty much as optimized/fast as it can be.
> >>The slowdown must be due to one of two reasons:
> >>
> >>- A bug related to running out of requests, perhaps a missing queue run
> >>or something like that.
> >>- A smaller number of available requests, due to the requested queue
> >>depth.
> >>
> >>Looking at Barts results, it looks like it's usually fast, but sometimes
> >>very slow. That would seem to indicate it's option #1 above that is the
> >>issue. Bart, since this seems to wait for quite a bit, would it be
> >>possible to cat the 'tags' file for that queue when it is stuck like
> >>that?
> >
> >Hello Jens,
> >
> >Thanks for the assistance. Is this the output you were looking for ?
> >
> ># dmsetup table /dev/dm-1
> >0 256000 multipath 0 0 2 1 service-time 0 1 2 8:32 1 1 service-time 0 1
> >2 8:48 1 1
> >
> ># ls -ld /dev/sd[cd]
> >brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 32 Jan  7 11:16 /dev/sdc
> >brw-rw---- 1 root disk 8, 48 Jan  7 11:16 /dev/sdd
> >
> ># time mkfs.xfs -f /dev/dm-1 &
> >[ ... ]
> >real    4m12.101s
> >
> ># for d in sdc sdd; do echo ==== $d; (cd /sys/block/$d/mq &&
> >   find|cut -c3-|grep tag|xargs grep -aH ''); done
> 
> You forgot dm-1, that's what mkfs is sleeping on. But given that
> sdc/sdd look idle, it still looks like a case of dm-1 not
> appropriately running the queues after insertion.

DM never directly runs the queues of the underlying SCSI devices
(e.g. sdc, sdd).

request-based DM runs the DM device's queue on completion of a clone
request:

dm_end_request -> rq_completed -> blk_run_queue_async

Which ultimately does seem to be the wrong way around (like you say:
queue should run after insertion).