block, bfq: prevent soft_rt_next_start from being stuck at infinity
BFQ can deem a bfq_queue as soft real-time only if the queue
- periodically becomes completely idle, i.e., empty and with
no still-outstanding I/O request;
- after becoming idle, gets new I/O only after a special reference
time soft_rt_next_start.
In this respect, after commit "block, bfq: consider also past I/O in
soft real-time detection", the value of soft_rt_next_start can never
decrease. This causes a problem with the following special updating
case for soft_rt_next_start: to prevent queues that are not completely
idle to be wrongly detected as soft real-time (when they become
non-empty again), soft_rt_next_start is temporarily set to infinity
for empty queues with still outstanding I/O requests. But, if such an
update is actually performed, then, because of the above commit,
soft_rt_next_start will be stuck at infinity forever, and the queue
will have no more chance to be considered soft real-time.
On slow systems, this problem does cause actual soft real-time
applications to be occasionally not detected as such.
This commit addresses this issue by eliminating the pushing of
soft_rt_next_start to infinity, and by changing the way non-empty
queues are prevented from being wrongly detected as soft
real-time. Simply, a queue that becomes non-empty again can now be
detected as soft real-time only if it has no outstanding I/O request.
git / linux.git / commit