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Davide Sapienza authored
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.

Signed-off-by: default avatarDavide Sapienza <sapienza.dav@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: default avatarPaolo Valente <paolo.valente@linaro.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarJens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
f6c3ca0e
Linux kernel
============

There are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can
be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. Please read
Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst first.

In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or
``make pdfdocs``.  The formatted documentation can also be read online at:

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory,
several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation.
See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file.

Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the
requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about
the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.