block, bfq: postpone rq preparation to insert or merge

When invoked for an I/O request rq, the prepare_request hook of bfq
increments reference counters in the destination bfq_queue for rq. In
this respect, after this hook has been invoked, rq may still be
transformed into a request with no icq attached, i.e., for bfq, a
request not associated with any bfq_queue. No further hook is invoked
to signal this tranformation to bfq (in general, to the destination
elevator for rq). This leads bfq into an inconsistent state, because
bfq has no chance to correctly lower these counters back. This
inconsistency may in its turn cause incorrect scheduling and hangs. It
certainly causes memory leaks, by making it impossible for bfq to free
the involved bfq_queue.

On the bright side, no transformation can still happen for rq after rq
has been inserted into bfq, or merged with another, already inserted,
request. Exploiting this fact, this commit addresses the above issue
by delaying the preparation of an I/O request to when the request is
inserted or merged.

This change also gives a performance bonus: a lock-contention point
gets removed. To prepare a request, bfq needs to hold its scheduler
lock. After postponing request preparation to insertion or merging, no
lock needs to be grabbed any longer in the prepare_request hook, while
the lock already taken to perform insertion or merging is used to
preparare the request as well.

Tested-by: Oleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
Tested-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@wdc.com>
Signed-off-by: Paolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>

0 files changed, 0 insertions, 0 deletions