[dm-devel] should blk-mq halt requeue processing while queue is frozen? [was: Re: [PATCH 8/9] dm: Fix two race conditions related to stopping and starting queues]

[Mike Snitzer]

On Fri, Sep 02 2016 at 11:12am -0400,
Mike Snitzer <snitzer at redhat.com> wrote:
 
> So in the case of blk-mq request-based DM: we cannot expect
> blk_mq_freeze_queue(), during suspend, to complete if requests are
> getting requeued to the blk-mq queue via BLK_MQ_RQ_QUEUE_BUSY.

Looking closer at blk-mq.  Currently __blk_mq_run_hw_queue() will move
any requeued requests to the hctx->dispatch list and then performs async
blk_mq_run_hw_queue().

To do what you hoped (have blk_mq_freeze_queue() discontinue all use of
blk-mq hw queues during DM suspend) I think we'd need blk-mq to:
1) avoid processing requeued IO if blk_mq_freeze_queue() was used to
   freeze the queue.  Meaning it'd have to hold requeued work longer
   than it currently does.
2) Then once blk_mq_unfreeze_queue() is called it'd allow requeues to
   proceed.

This would be catering to a very specific requirement of DM (given it
re-queues IO back to the request_queue during suspend).

BUT all said, relative to request-based DM multipath, what we have is
perfectly fine on a correctness level: the requests are re-queued
because the blk-mq DM device is suspended.

Unfortunately on an efficiency level DM suspend creates a lot of busy
looping in blk-mq, with 100% cpu usage in a threads with names
"kworker/3:1H", ideally we'd avoid that!