D2FQ: Device-Direct Fair Queueing for NVMe SSDs

With modern high-performance SSDs that can handle parallel I/O requests from multiple tenants, fair sharing of block I/O is an essential requirement for performance isolation. Typical block I/O schedulers take three steps (submit-arbitrate-dispatch) to transfer an I/O request to a device, and the three steps incur high overheads in terms of CPU utilization, scalability and block I/O performance. This motivates us to offload the I/O scheduling function to a device. If so, the three steps can be reduced to one step (submit=dispatch), thereby saving CPU cycles and improving the I/O performance.

To this end, we propose D2FQ, a fair-queueing I/O scheduler that exploits the NVMe weighted round-robin (WRR) arbitration, a device-side I/O scheduling feature. D2FQ abstracts the three classes of command queues in WRR as three queues with different I/O processing speeds. Then, for every I/O submission D2FQ selects and dispatches an I/O request to one of three queues immediately while satisfying fairness. This avoids time-consuming I/O scheduling operations, thereby saving CPU cycles and improving the block I/O performance. The prototype is implemented in the Linux kernel and evaluated with various workloads. With synthetic workloads, D2FQ provides fairness while saving CPU cycles by up to 45% as compared to MQFQ, a state-of-the-art fair queueing I/O scheduler.