Hi Jens, Steve, Masami,
In high-performance storage environments, particularly when utilising RAID
controllers with shared tag sets (BLK_MQ_F_TAG_HCTX_SHARED), severe latency
spikes can occur when fast devices are starved of available tags.
Currently, diagnosing this specific queue contention requires deploying
dynamic kprobes or inferring sleep states, which lacks a simple,
out-of-the-box diagnostic path.
This short series introduces dedicated, low-overhead observability for tag
exhaustion events in the block layer:
- Patch 1 introduces the "block_rq_tag_wait" tracepoint in the tag
allocation slow-path to capture precise, event-based starvation.
- Patch 2 complements this by exposing "wait_on_hw_tag" and
"wait_on_sched_tag" per-CPU counters via debugfs for quick,
point-in-time cumulative polling.
Together, these provide storage engineers with zero-configuration
mechanisms to definitively identify shared-tag bottlenecks.
Please let me know your thoughts.
Changes since v5 [1]:
- Replaced this_cpu_inc() with raw_cpu_inc() within
blk_mq_debugfs_inc_wait_tags(). This resolves a preemption warning
triggered under CONFIG_DEBUG_PREEMPT=y, as the routine is invoked from a
preemptible context immediately prior to io_schedule(). This adjustment
deliberately prioritises the reduction of execution overhead over
absolute statistical precision for this diagnostic interface.
Changes since v4 [2]:
- Prevented a NULL pointer dereference in the tracepoint fast-assign for
disk-less request queues by safely checking q->disk before resolving the
dev_t
- Fixed a Use-After-Free (UAF) and permanent memory leak by decoupling
the per-CPU counter allocation from the volatile debugfs lifecycle and
tying it directly to the core hctx lifecycle (i.e., blk_mq_init_hctx()
and blk_mq_exit_hctx())
- Fixed a potential compiler double-fetch bug by wrapping the per-CPU
pointer evaluations with READ_ONCE() in blk_mq_debugfs_inc_wait_tags()
- Passed the appropriate gfp_t flags down to the allocation routines to
maintain the strict GFP_NOIO context
- Updated kernel-doc descriptions to clarify that the NULL pointer
checks guard against memory allocation failures under pressure, rather
than initialisation race conditions
Changes since v3 [3]:
- Transitioned tracking architecture from shared atomic_t variables to
dynamically allocated per-CPU counters to resolve cache line bouncing
(Bart Van Assche)
Changes since v2 [4]:
- Added "Reviewed-by:" and "Tested-by:" tags for patch 1
- Evaluate is_sched_tag directly within TP_fast_assign (Steven Rostedt)
- Introduced atomic counters via debugfs
Changes since v1 [5]:
- Improved the description of the trace point (Damien Le Moal)
- Removed the redundant "active requests" (Laurence Oberman)
- Introduced pool-specific starvation tracking
[1]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
[2]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
[3]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
[4]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
[5]: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/[email protected]/
Aaron Tomlin (2):
blk-mq: add tracepoint block_rq_tag_wait
blk-mq: expose tag starvation counts via debugfs
block/blk-mq-debugfs.c | 109 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
block/blk-mq-debugfs.h | 19 ++++++
block/blk-mq-tag.c | 8 +++
block/blk-mq.c | 5 ++
include/linux/blk-mq.h | 12 ++++
include/trace/events/block.h | 43 ++++++++++++++
6 files changed, 196 insertions(+)
--
2.51.0
