[PATCH v3 0/4] blk-iocost: charge flushes and zone appends
From: Tao Cui
Date: Sun Sep 20 2026 - 23:35:21 EST
From: Tao Cui <cuitao@xxxxxxxxxx>
While testing iocost's weight-based throttling under concurrent IO, we
observed that a cgroup limited to 1% weight could issue an unbounded
number of flushes without being throttled: an fsync loop produced ~510k
flushes in 12s with cost.usage staying at zero the entire time. The
device was monopolized while iocost reported no activity. Zone appends
were in the same position: the builtin linear cost model defines
coefficients only for READ and WRITE, so REQ_OP_ZONE_APPEND is priced
at zero and excluded from the latency statistics as well.
This series prices both, without changing the behavior of existing
setups:
1/4: add a flushiops entry to io.cost.model, translated like the
other iops coefficients (VTIME_PER_SEC / flushiops). A bio with
REQ_PREFLUSH is charged one flush on top of its data cost, and a
bio with REQ_FUA one more flush on devices without native FUA
support (bdev_fua()), mirroring the pre-flush and post-flush the
block layer issues for them. flushiops is zero in the builtin
profiles with no fallback to the write coefficients, so nothing
changes until it is configured. Also documents flushiops in
cgroup-v2.rst.
2/4: treat zone appends as writes in the builtin cost model -
REQ_OP_ZONE_APPEND falls through to the REQ_OP_WRITE
coefficients.
3/4: count zone append completions in the latency window so the vrate
feedback loop can see ZA-induced latency.
4/4: fix a stale comment in ioc_rqos_throttle().
Measured on virtio-blk with a bio test module issuing bios from a
cgroup (300 bios per phase):
- plain writes cost 23.41 usec, unchanged
- with the default model, WRITE|PREFLUSH and standalone flushes cost
the same as before: the flush component is free until flushiops is
configured
- with flushiops=100, WRITE|PREFLUSH and WRITE|FUA are charged
+10000 usec per bio and WRITE|PREFLUSH|FUA +20000, exactly
VTIME_PER_SEC / 100 per flush (virtio-blk has no native FUA,
confirmed via queue/fua)
- standalone flushes are charged 10000.06 usec each, matching
VTIME_PER_SEC / 100
- with flushiops=10, a flush storm from a low-weight cgroup is
throttled to one flush per 100ms
Changes in v2:
- charge the flush component of data-bearing REQ_PREFLUSH bios too,
not only standalone flushes (Christoph)
- skip the iocg->cursor update for dataless flush bios
Changes in v3:
- the write-coefficient flush pricing is replaced by the flushiops
model parameter: pricing a flush off the write coefficients is as
arbitrary as pricing it at zero and changes what existing setups
get charged, so flushes are only priced when flushiops is
configured (Tejun)
- the zone append patch is reduced to the minimal change: ZA falls
through to the REQ_OP_WRITE coefficients and the cursor is left
alone (Tejun)
- the Fixes tags on 2/4 and 3/4 point at 0512a75b98f8, which added
the op without pricing it; 3/4 is otherwise unchanged from v2
Tao Cui (4):
blk-iocost: add flush cost support with the flushiops model parameter
blk-iocost: charge zone appends as writes
blk-iocost: account zone append completions in latency stats
blk-iocost: fix stale comment in ioc_rqos_throttle()
Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v2.rst | 8 ++++++++
block/blk-iocost.c | 40 ++++++++++++++++++++++---------
2 files changed, 48 insertions(+), 9 deletions(-)
--
2.43.0