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1 BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing) 2 ========================== 3 4 BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, with some extra 5 low-latency capabilities. In addition to cgroups support (blkio or io 6 controllers), BFQ's main features are: 7 - BFQ guarantees a high system and application responsiveness, and a 8 low latency for time-sensitive applications, such as audio or video 9 players; 10 - BFQ distributes bandwidth, and not just time, among processes or 11 groups (switching back to time distribution when needed to keep 12 throughput high). 13 14 In its default configuration, BFQ privileges latency over 15 throughput. So, when needed for achieving a lower latency, BFQ builds 16 schedules that may lead to a lower throughput. If your main or only 17 goal, for a given device, is to achieve the maximum-possible 18 throughput at all times, then do switch off all low-latency heuristics 19 for that device, by setting low_latency to 0. See Section 3 for 20 details on how to configure BFQ for the desired tradeoff between 21 latency and throughput, or on how to maximize throughput. 22 23 BFQ has a non-null overhead, which limits the maximum IOPS that a CPU 24 can process for a device scheduled with BFQ. To give an idea of the 25 limits on slow or average CPUs, here are, first, the limits of BFQ for 26 three different CPUs, on, respectively, an average laptop, an old 27 desktop, and a cheap embedded system, in case full hierarchical 28 support is enabled (i.e., CONFIG_BFQ_GROUP_IOSCHED is set), but 29 CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is not set (Section 4-2): 30 - Intel i7-4850HQ: 400 KIOPS 31 - AMD A8-3850: 250 KIOPS 32 - ARM CortexTM-A53 Octa-core: 80 KIOPS 33 34 If CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is set (and of course full hierarchical 35 support is enabled), then the sustainable throughput with BFQ 36 decreases, because all blkio.bfq* statistics are created and updated 37 (Section 4-2). For BFQ, this leads to the following maximum 38 sustainable throughputs, on the same systems as above: 39 - Intel i7-4850HQ: 310 KIOPS 40 - AMD A8-3850: 200 KIOPS 41 - ARM CortexTM-A53 Octa-core: 56 KIOPS 42 43 BFQ works for multi-queue devices too. 44 45 The table of contents follow. Impatients can just jump to Section 3. 46 47 CONTENTS 48 49 1. When may BFQ be useful? 50 1-1 Personal systems 51 1-2 Server systems 52 2. How does BFQ work? 53 3. What are BFQ's tunables and how to properly configure BFQ? 54 4. BFQ group scheduling 55 4-1 Service guarantees provided 56 4-2 Interface 57 58 1. When may BFQ be useful? 59 ========================== 60 61 BFQ provides the following benefits on personal and server systems. 62 63 1-1 Personal systems 64 -------------------- 65 66 Low latency for interactive applications 67 68 Regardless of the actual background workload, BFQ guarantees that, for 69 interactive tasks, the storage device is virtually as responsive as if 70 it was idle. For example, even if one or more of the following 71 background workloads are being executed: 72 - one or more large files are being read, written or copied, 73 - a tree of source files is being compiled, 74 - one or more virtual machines are performing I/O, 75 - a software update is in progress, 76 - indexing daemons are scanning filesystems and updating their 77 databases, 78 starting an application or loading a file from within an application 79 takes about the same time as if the storage device was idle. As a 80 comparison, with CFQ, NOOP or DEADLINE, and in the same conditions, 81 applications experience high latencies, or even become unresponsive 82 until the background workload terminates (also on SSDs). 83 84 Low latency for soft real-time applications 85 86 Also soft real-time applications, such as audio and video 87 players/streamers, enjoy a low latency and a low drop rate, regardless 88 of the background I/O workload. As a consequence, these applications 89 do not suffer from almost any glitch due to the background workload. 90 91 Higher speed for code-development tasks 92 93 If some additional workload happens to be executed in parallel, then 94 BFQ executes the I/O-related components of typical code-development 95 tasks (compilation, checkout, merge, ...) much more quickly than CFQ, 96 NOOP or DEADLINE. 97 98 High throughput 99 100 On hard disks, BFQ achieves up to 30% higher throughput than CFQ, and 101 up to 150% higher throughput than DEADLINE and NOOP, with all the 102 sequential workloads considered in our tests. With random workloads, 103 and with all the workloads on flash-based devices, BFQ achieves, 104 instead, about the same throughput as the other schedulers. 105 106 Strong fairness, bandwidth and delay guarantees 107 108 BFQ distributes the device throughput, and not just the device time, 109 among I/O-bound applications in proportion their weights, with any 110 workload and regardless of the device parameters. From these bandwidth 111 guarantees, it is possible to compute tight per-I/O-request delay 112 guarantees by a simple formula. If not configured for strict service 113 guarantees, BFQ switches to time-based resource sharing (only) for 114 applications that would otherwise cause a throughput loss. 115 116 1-2 Server systems 117 ------------------ 118 119 Most benefits for server systems follow from the same service 120 properties as above. In particular, regardless of whether additional, 121 possibly heavy workloads are being served, BFQ guarantees: 122 123 . audio and video-streaming with zero or very low jitter and drop 124 rate; 125 126 . fast retrieval of WEB pages and embedded objects; 127 128 . real-time recording of data in live-dumping applications (e.g., 129 packet logging); 130 131 . responsiveness in local and remote access to a server. 132 133 134 2. How does BFQ work? 135 ===================== 136 137 BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, whose general structure, 138 plus a lot of code, are borrowed from CFQ. 139 140 - Each process doing I/O on a device is associated with a weight and a 141 (bfq_)queue. 142 143 - BFQ grants exclusive access to the device, for a while, to one queue 144 (process) at a time, and implements this service model by 145 associating every queue with a budget, measured in number of 146 sectors. 147 148 - After a queue is granted access to the device, the budget of the 149 queue is decremented, on each request dispatch, by the size of the 150 request. 151 152 - The in-service queue is expired, i.e., its service is suspended, 153 only if one of the following events occurs: 1) the queue finishes 154 its budget, 2) the queue empties, 3) a "budget timeout" fires. 155 156 - The budget timeout prevents processes doing random I/O from 157 holding the device for too long and dramatically reducing 158 throughput. 159 160 - Actually, as in CFQ, a queue associated with a process issuing 161 sync requests may not be expired immediately when it empties. In 162 contrast, BFQ may idle the device for a short time interval, 163 giving the process the chance to go on being served if it issues 164 a new request in time. Device idling typically boosts the 165 throughput on rotational devices and on non-queueing flash-based 166 devices, if processes do synchronous and sequential I/O. In 167 addition, under BFQ, device idling is also instrumental in 168 guaranteeing the desired throughput fraction to processes 169 issuing sync requests (see the description of the slice_idle 170 tunable in this document, or [1, 2], for more details). 171 172 - With respect to idling for service guarantees, if several 173 processes are competing for the device at the same time, but 174 all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ 175 guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever 176 idling the device. Throughput is thus as high as possible in 177 this common scenario. 178 179 - On flash-based storage with internal queueing of commands 180 (typically NCQ), device idling happens to be always detrimental 181 for throughput. So, with these devices, BFQ performs idling 182 only when strictly needed for service guarantees, i.e., for 183 guaranteeing low latency or fairness. In these cases, overall 184 throughput may be sub-optimal. No solution currently exists to 185 provide both strong service guarantees and optimal throughput 186 on devices with internal queueing. 187 188 - If low-latency mode is enabled (default configuration), BFQ 189 executes some special heuristics to detect interactive and soft 190 real-time applications (e.g., video or audio players/streamers), 191 and to reduce their latency. The most important action taken to 192 achieve this goal is to give to the queues associated with these 193 applications more than their fair share of the device 194 throughput. For brevity, we call just "weight-raising" the whole 195 sets of actions taken by BFQ to privilege these queues. In 196 particular, BFQ provides a milder form of weight-raising for 197 interactive applications, and a stronger form for soft real-time 198 applications. 199 200 - BFQ automatically deactivates idling for queues born in a burst of 201 queue creations. In fact, these queues are usually associated with 202 the processes of applications and services that benefit mostly 203 from a high throughput. Examples are systemd during boot, or git 204 grep. 205 206 - As CFQ, BFQ merges queues performing interleaved I/O, i.e., 207 performing random I/O that becomes mostly sequential if 208 merged. Differently from CFQ, BFQ achieves this goal with a more 209 reactive mechanism, called Early Queue Merge (EQM). EQM is so 210 responsive in detecting interleaved I/O (cooperating processes), 211 that it enables BFQ to achieve a high throughput, by queue 212 merging, even for queues for which CFQ needs a different 213 mechanism, preemption, to get a high throughput. As such EQM is a 214 unified mechanism to achieve a high throughput with interleaved 215 I/O. 216 217 - Queues are scheduled according to a variant of WF2Q+, named 218 B-WF2Q+, and implemented using an augmented rb-tree to preserve an 219 O(log N) overall complexity. See [2] for more details. B-WF2Q+ is 220 also ready for hierarchical scheduling, details in Section 4. 221 222 - B-WF2Q+ guarantees a tight deviation with respect to an ideal, 223 perfectly fair, and smooth service. In particular, B-WF2Q+ 224 guarantees that each queue receives a fraction of the device 225 throughput proportional to its weight, even if the throughput 226 fluctuates, and regardless of: the device parameters, the current 227 workload and the budgets assigned to the queue. 228 229 - The last, budget-independence, property (although probably 230 counterintuitive in the first place) is definitely beneficial, for 231 the following reasons: 232 233 - First, with any proportional-share scheduler, the maximum 234 deviation with respect to an ideal service is proportional to 235 the maximum budget (slice) assigned to queues. As a consequence, 236 BFQ can keep this deviation tight not only because of the 237 accurate service of B-WF2Q+, but also because BFQ *does not* 238 need to assign a larger budget to a queue to let the queue 239 receive a higher fraction of the device throughput. 240 241 - Second, BFQ is free to choose, for every process (queue), the 242 budget that best fits the needs of the process, or best 243 leverages the I/O pattern of the process. In particular, BFQ 244 updates queue budgets with a simple feedback-loop algorithm that 245 allows a high throughput to be achieved, while still providing 246 tight latency guarantees to time-sensitive applications. When 247 the in-service queue expires, this algorithm computes the next 248 budget of the queue so as to: 249 250 - Let large budgets be eventually assigned to the queues 251 associated with I/O-bound applications performing sequential 252 I/O: in fact, the longer these applications are served once 253 got access to the device, the higher the throughput is. 254 255 - Let small budgets be eventually assigned to the queues 256 associated with time-sensitive applications (which typically 257 perform sporadic and short I/O), because, the smaller the 258 budget assigned to a queue waiting for service is, the sooner 259 B-WF2Q+ will serve that queue (Subsec 3.3 in [2]). 260 261 - If several processes are competing for the device at the same time, 262 but all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ 263 guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling 264 the device. It uses preemption instead. Throughput is then much 265 higher in this common scenario. 266 267 - ioprio classes are served in strict priority order, i.e., 268 lower-priority queues are not served as long as there are 269 higher-priority queues. Among queues in the same class, the 270 bandwidth is distributed in proportion to the weight of each 271 queue. A very thin extra bandwidth is however guaranteed to 272 the Idle class, to prevent it from starving. 273 274 275 3. What are BFQ's tunables and how to properly configure BFQ? 276 ============================================================= 277 278 Most BFQ tunables affect service guarantees (basically latency and 279 fairness) and throughput. For full details on how to choose the 280 desired tradeoff between service guarantees and throughput, see the 281 parameters slice_idle, strict_guarantees and low_latency. For details 282 on how to maximise throughput, see slice_idle, timeout_sync and 283 max_budget. The other performance-related parameters have been 284 inherited from, and have been preserved mostly for compatibility with 285 CFQ. So far, no performance improvement has been reported after 286 changing the latter parameters in BFQ. 287 288 In particular, the tunables back_seek-max, back_seek_penalty, 289 fifo_expire_async and fifo_expire_sync below are the same as in 290 CFQ. Their description is just copied from that for CFQ. Some 291 considerations in the description of slice_idle are copied from CFQ 292 too. 293 294 per-process ioprio and weight 295 ----------------------------- 296 297 Unless the cgroups interface is used (see "4. BFQ group scheduling"), 298 weights can be assigned to processes only indirectly, through I/O 299 priorities, and according to the relation: 300 weight = (IOPRIO_BE_NR - ioprio) * 10. 301 302 Beware that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the 303 weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time 304 applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights. 305 306 slice_idle 307 ---------- 308 309 This parameter specifies how long BFQ should idle for next I/O 310 request, when certain sync BFQ queues become empty. By default 311 slice_idle is a non-zero value. Idling has a double purpose: boosting 312 throughput and making sure that the desired throughput distribution is 313 respected (see the description of how BFQ works, and, if needed, the 314 papers referred there). 315 316 As for throughput, idling can be very helpful on highly seeky media 317 like single spindle SATA/SAS disks where we can cut down on overall 318 number of seeks and see improved throughput. 319 320 Setting slice_idle to 0 will remove all the idling on queues and one 321 should see an overall improved throughput on faster storage devices 322 like multiple SATA/SAS disks in hardware RAID configuration, as well 323 as flash-based storage with internal command queueing (and 324 parallelism). 325 326 So depending on storage and workload, it might be useful to set 327 slice_idle=0. In general for SATA/SAS disks and software RAID of 328 SATA/SAS disks keeping slice_idle enabled should be useful. For any 329 configurations where there are multiple spindles behind single LUN 330 (Host based hardware RAID controller or for storage arrays), or with 331 flash-based fast storage, setting slice_idle=0 might end up in better 332 throughput and acceptable latencies. 333 334 Idling is however necessary to have service guarantees enforced in 335 case of differentiated weights or differentiated I/O-request lengths. 336 To see why, suppose that a given BFQ queue A must get several I/O 337 requests served for each request served for another queue B. Idling 338 ensures that, if A makes a new I/O request slightly after becoming 339 empty, then no request of B is dispatched in the middle, and thus A 340 does not lose the possibility to get more than one request dispatched 341 before the next request of B is dispatched. Note that idling 342 guarantees the desired differentiated treatment of queues only in 343 terms of I/O-request dispatches. To guarantee that the actual service 344 order then corresponds to the dispatch order, the strict_guarantees 345 tunable must be set too. 346 347 There is an important flipside for idling: apart from the above cases 348 where it is beneficial also for throughput, idling can severely impact 349 throughput. One important case is random workload. Because of this 350 issue, BFQ tends to avoid idling as much as possible, when it is not 351 beneficial also for throughput (as detailed in Section 2). As a 352 consequence of this behavior, and of further issues described for the 353 strict_guarantees tunable, short-term service guarantees may be 354 occasionally violated. And, in some cases, these guarantees may be 355 more important than guaranteeing maximum throughput. For example, in 356 video playing/streaming, a very low drop rate may be more important 357 than maximum throughput. In these cases, consider setting the 358 strict_guarantees parameter. 359 360 strict_guarantees 361 ----------------- 362 363 If this parameter is set (default: unset), then BFQ 364 365 - always performs idling when the in-service queue becomes empty; 366 367 - forces the device to serve one I/O request at a time, by dispatching a 368 new request only if there is no outstanding request. 369 370 In the presence of differentiated weights or I/O-request sizes, both 371 the above conditions are needed to guarantee that every BFQ queue 372 receives its allotted share of the bandwidth. The first condition is 373 needed for the reasons explained in the description of the slice_idle 374 tunable. The second condition is needed because all modern storage 375 devices reorder internally-queued requests, which may trivially break 376 the service guarantees enforced by the I/O scheduler. 377 378 Setting strict_guarantees may evidently affect throughput. 379 380 back_seek_max 381 ------------- 382 383 This specifies, given in Kbytes, the maximum "distance" for backward seeking. 384 The distance is the amount of space from the current head location to the 385 sectors that are backward in terms of distance. 386 387 This parameter allows the scheduler to anticipate requests in the "backward" 388 direction and consider them as being the "next" if they are within this 389 distance from the current head location. 390 391 back_seek_penalty 392 ----------------- 393 394 This parameter is used to compute the cost of backward seeking. If the 395 backward distance of request is just 1/back_seek_penalty from a "front" 396 request, then the seeking cost of two requests is considered equivalent. 397 398 So scheduler will not bias toward one or the other request (otherwise scheduler 399 will bias toward front request). Default value of back_seek_penalty is 2. 400 401 fifo_expire_async 402 ----------------- 403 404 This parameter is used to set the timeout of asynchronous requests. Default 405 value of this is 248ms. 406 407 fifo_expire_sync 408 ---------------- 409 410 This parameter is used to set the timeout of synchronous requests. Default 411 value of this is 124ms. In case to favor synchronous requests over asynchronous 412 one, this value should be decreased relative to fifo_expire_async. 413 414 low_latency 415 ----------- 416 417 This parameter is used to enable/disable BFQ's low latency mode. By 418 default, low latency mode is enabled. If enabled, interactive and soft 419 real-time applications are privileged and experience a lower latency, 420 as explained in more detail in the description of how BFQ works. 421 422 DISABLE this mode if you need full control on bandwidth 423 distribution. In fact, if it is enabled, then BFQ automatically 424 increases the bandwidth share of privileged applications, as the main 425 means to guarantee a lower latency to them. 426 427 In addition, as already highlighted at the beginning of this document, 428 DISABLE this mode if your only goal is to achieve a high throughput. 429 In fact, privileging the I/O of some application over the rest may 430 entail a lower throughput. To achieve the highest-possible throughput 431 on a non-rotational device, setting slice_idle to 0 may be needed too 432 (at the cost of giving up any strong guarantee on fairness and low 433 latency). 434 435 timeout_sync 436 ------------ 437 438 Maximum amount of device time that can be given to a task (queue) once 439 it has been selected for service. On devices with costly seeks, 440 increasing this time usually increases maximum throughput. On the 441 opposite end, increasing this time coarsens the granularity of the 442 short-term bandwidth and latency guarantees, especially if the 443 following parameter is set to zero. 444 445 max_budget 446 ---------- 447 448 Maximum amount of service, measured in sectors, that can be provided 449 to a BFQ queue once it is set in service (of course within the limits 450 of the above timeout). According to what said in the description of 451 the algorithm, larger values increase the throughput in proportion to 452 the percentage of sequential I/O requests issued. The price of larger 453 values is that they coarsen the granularity of short-term bandwidth 454 and latency guarantees. 455 456 The default value is 0, which enables auto-tuning: BFQ sets max_budget 457 to the maximum number of sectors that can be served during 458 timeout_sync, according to the estimated peak rate. 459 460 For specific devices, some users have occasionally reported to have 461 reached a higher throughput by setting max_budget explicitly, i.e., by 462 setting max_budget to a higher value than 0. In particular, they have 463 set max_budget to higher values than those to which BFQ would have set 464 it with auto-tuning. An alternative way to achieve this goal is to 465 just increase the value of timeout_sync, leaving max_budget equal to 0. 466 467 weights 468 ------- 469 470 Read-only parameter, used to show the weights of the currently active 471 BFQ queues. 472 473 474 4. Group scheduling with BFQ 475 ============================ 476 477 BFQ supports both cgroups-v1 and cgroups-v2 io controllers, namely 478 blkio and io. In particular, BFQ supports weight-based proportional 479 share. To activate cgroups support, set BFQ_GROUP_IOSCHED. 480 481 4-1 Service guarantees provided 482 ------------------------------- 483 484 With BFQ, proportional share means true proportional share of the 485 device bandwidth, according to group weights. For example, a group 486 with weight 200 gets twice the bandwidth, and not just twice the time, 487 of a group with weight 100. 488 489 BFQ supports hierarchies (group trees) of any depth. Bandwidth is 490 distributed among groups and processes in the expected way: for each 491 group, the children of the group share the whole bandwidth of the 492 group in proportion to their weights. In particular, this implies 493 that, for each leaf group, every process of the group receives the 494 same share of the whole group bandwidth, unless the ioprio of the 495 process is modified. 496 497 The resource-sharing guarantee for a group may partially or totally 498 switch from bandwidth to time, if providing bandwidth guarantees to 499 the group lowers the throughput too much. This switch occurs on a 500 per-process basis: if a process of a leaf group causes throughput loss 501 if served in such a way to receive its share of the bandwidth, then 502 BFQ switches back to just time-based proportional share for that 503 process. 504 505 4-2 Interface 506 ------------- 507 508 To get proportional sharing of bandwidth with BFQ for a given device, 509 BFQ must of course be the active scheduler for that device. 510 511 Within each group directory, the names of the files associated with 512 BFQ-specific cgroup parameters and stats begin with the "bfq." 513 prefix. So, with cgroups-v1 or cgroups-v2, the full prefix for 514 BFQ-specific files is "blkio.bfq." or "io.bfq." For example, the group 515 parameter to set the weight of a group with BFQ is blkio.bfq.weight 516 or io.bfq.weight. 517 518 As for cgroups-v1 (blkio controller), the exact set of stat files 519 created, and kept up-to-date by bfq, depends on whether 520 CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is set. If it is set, then bfq creates all 521 the stat files documented in 522 Documentation/cgroup-v1/blkio-controller.txt. If, instead, 523 CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP is not set, then bfq creates only the files 524 blkio.bfq.io_service_bytes 525 blkio.bfq.io_service_bytes_recursive 526 blkio.bfq.io_serviced 527 blkio.bfq.io_serviced_recursive 528 529 The value of CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP greatly influences the maximum 530 throughput sustainable with bfq, because updating the blkio.bfq.* 531 stats is rather costly, especially for some of the stats enabled by 532 CONFIG_DEBUG_BLK_CGROUP. 533 534 Parameters to set 535 ----------------- 536 537 For each group, there is only the following parameter to set. 538 539 weight (namely blkio.bfq.weight or io.bfq-weight): the weight of the 540 group inside its parent. Available values: 1..10000 (default 100). The 541 linear mapping between ioprio and weights, described at the beginning 542 of the tunable section, is still valid, but all weights higher than 543 IOPRIO_BE_NR*10 are mapped to ioprio 0. 544 545 Recall that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the 546 weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time 547 applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights. 548 549 550 [1] P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O 551 Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System 552 Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015. 553 http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf 554 555 [2] P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application 556 Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of 557 the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference 558 (SYSTOR '12), June 2012. 559 Slightly extended version: 560 http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite- 561 results.pdf