On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 08:26:37PM -0700, Matt Thomas wrote:
> 
> There's a problem with applying this to disks...  Unlike a network,
> if I issuing sequential writes, if someone issue a write to a far lba,
> that's going to screw my latency which I have to seek back.  That
> wouldn't happen in a network where I communicating to a local host
> on my LAN and then send a packet over the internet.

I think what you want to do -- and I think this was Bill Sommerfeld's
original idea for the right metric here, though it's been a while and
my memory is fuzzy -- is penalize those who write when the average
latency, across all writers, is increasing.  And you probably want to
scale this to the number of writes, to obtain something like the
"average write cost" per writer.  The processes with the highest
average write cost are the ones to put to sleep if you want the
fairest scheduling across processes.

Note that when the disk isn't busy, most processes' write cost will
stay within a fairly narrow band.  But when it _is_ busy, the write
costs will separate, because anyone who happens to always force a
seek when he writes will be penalized accordingly -- and much more
heavily than the other processes whose sequential write streams were
seeked away-from and back-to, because _most_ (though not all) of their
I/O will be sequential.