GitLab

Remove an avoidable 3ms delay on some dm-raid1 and kcopyd I/O.

It is specified that any submitted bio without BIO_RW_SYNC flag may plug the
queue (i.e. block the requests from being dispatched to the physical device).

The queue is unplugged when the caller calls blk_unplug() function. Usually, the
sequence is that someone calls submit_bh to submit IO on a buffer. The IO plugs
the queue and waits (to be possibly joined with other adjacent bios). Then, when
the caller calls wait_on_buffer(), it unplugs the queue and submits the IOs to
the disk.

This was happenning:

When doing O_SYNC writes, function fsync_buffers_list() submits a list of
bios to dm_raid1, the bios are added to dm_raid1 write queue and kmirrord is
woken up.

fsync_buffers_list() calls wait_on_buffer().  That unplugs the queue, but
there are no bios on the device queue as they are still in the dm_raid1 queue.

wait_on_buffer() starts waiting until the IO is finished.

kmirrord is scheduled, kmirrord takes bios...