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  • Paolo Valente's avatar
    block, bfq: make lookup_next_entity push up vtime on expirations · 80294c3b
    Paolo Valente authored
    
    
    To provide a very smooth service, bfq starts to serve a bfq_queue
    only if the queue is 'eligible', i.e., if the same queue would
    have started to be served in the ideal, perfectly fair system that
    bfq simulates internally. This is obtained by associating each
    queue with a virtual start time, and by computing a special system
    virtual time quantity: a queue is eligible only if the system
    virtual time has reached the virtual start time of the
    queue. Finally, bfq guarantees that, when a new queue must be set
    in service, there is always at least one eligible entity for each
    active parent entity in the scheduler. To provide this guarantee,
    the function __bfq_lookup_next_entity pushes up, for each parent
    entity on which it is invoked, the system virtual time to the
    minimum among the virtual start times of the entities in the
    active tree for the parent entity (more precisely, the push up
    occurs if the system virtual time happens to be lower than all
    such virtual start times).
    
    There is however a circumstance in which __bfq_lookup_next_entity
    cannot push up the system virtual time for a parent entity, even
    if the system virtual time is lower than the virtual start times
    of all the child entities in the active tree. It happens if one of
    the child entities is in service. In fact, in such a case, there
    is already an eligible entity, the in-service one, even if it may
    not be not present in the active tree (because in-service entities
    may be removed from the active tree).
    
    Unfortunately, in the last re-design of the
    hierarchical-scheduling engine, the reset of the pointer to the
    in-service entity for a given parent entity--reset to be done as a
    consequence of the expiration of the in-service entity--always
    happens after the function __bfq_lookup_next_entity has been
    invoked. This causes the function to think that there is still an
    entity in service for the parent entity, and then that the system
    virtual time cannot be pushed up, even if actually such a
    no-more-in-service entity has already been properly reinserted
    into the active tree (or in some other tree if no more
    active). Yet, the system virtual time *had* to be pushed up, to be
    ready to correctly choose the next queue to serve. Because of the
    lack of this push up, bfq may wrongly set in service a queue that
    had been speculatively pre-computed as the possible
    next-in-service queue, but that would no more be the one to serve
    after the expiration and the reinsertion into the active trees of
    the previously in-service entities.
    
    This commit addresses this issue by making
    __bfq_lookup_next_entity properly push up the system virtual time
    if an expiration is occurring.
    
    Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
    Tested-by: default avatarLee Tibbert <lee.tibbert@gmail.com>
    Tested-by: default avatarOleksandr Natalenko <oleksandr@natalenko.name>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
    80294c3b