[dm-devel] [PATCH] block: transfer source bio's cgroup tags to clone via bio_associate_blkcg()

[Vivek Goyal]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 02:34:50PM -0600, Chris Friesen wrote:
> On 03/02/2016 02:10 PM, Vivek Goyal wrote:
> >On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 09:59:13PM +0200, Nikolay Borisov wrote:
> 
> >We had similar issue with IO priority and it did not work reliably with
> >CFQ on underlying device when dm devices were sitting on top.
> >
> >If we really want to give it a try, I guess we will have to put cgroup
> >info of submitter early in bio at the time of bio creation even for all
> >kind of IO. Not sure if it is worth the effort.
> 
> As it stands, imagine that you have a hypervisor node running many VMs (or
> containers), each of which is assigned a separate logical volume (possibly
> thin-provisioned) as its rootfs.
> 
> Ideally we want the disk accesses by those VMs to be "fair" relative to each
> other, and we want to guarantee a certain amount of bandwidth for the host
> as well.
> 
> Without this sort of feature, how can we accomplish that?

As of now, you can't. I will try adding bio_associate_current() and see
if that along with Mike's patches gets you what you are looking for.

On a side note, have you tried using CFQ's proportional logic with multile
VMs. Say partition the disk and pass each parition to VM/container and
do the IO. My main concern is that by default each cgroup can add
significant idling overhead and kill overall throughput of disk
(especially for random IO or if cgroup does not have enough IO to keep
disk busy).

One can disable group idling but that kills service differentiation for
most of the workloads.

So I was curious to know if CFQ's proportional bandwidth division is
helping you in real life. (without dm of course).

> 
> >For the case of IO throttling, I think you should put throttling rules on
> >the dm device itself. That means as long as filesystem supports the
> >cgroups, you should be getting right cgroup information for all kind of
> >IO and throttling should work just fine.
> 
> IO throttling isn't all that useful, since it requires you to know in
> advance what your IO rate is.  And it doesn't adjust nicely as the number of
> competing entities changes the way that weight-based schemes do.

Agreed that absolute limits are less useful as compared to dynamic limits
provided by weights. This is more useful for scenario where a cloud
provider does not want to provide disk bandwidth if user has not paid for
it (even if disk bandwidth is available).

Thanks
Vivek