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+==========================
+BFQ (Budget Fair Queueing)
+==========================
+
+BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, with some extra
+low-latency capabilities. In addition to cgroups support (blkio or io
+controllers), BFQ's main features are:
+
+- BFQ guarantees a high system and application responsiveness, and a
+  low latency for time-sensitive applications, such as audio or video
+  players;
+- BFQ distributes bandwidth, and not just time, among processes or
+  groups (switching back to time distribution when needed to keep
+  throughput high).
+
+In its default configuration, BFQ privileges latency over
+throughput. So, when needed for achieving a lower latency, BFQ builds
+schedules that may lead to a lower throughput. If your main or only
+goal, for a given device, is to achieve the maximum-possible
+throughput at all times, then do switch off all low-latency heuristics
+for that device, by setting low_latency to 0. See Section 3 for
+details on how to configure BFQ for the desired tradeoff between
+latency and throughput, or on how to maximize throughput.
+
+As every I/O scheduler, BFQ adds some overhead to per-I/O-request
+processing. To give an idea of this overhead, the total,
+single-lock-protected, per-request processing time of BFQ---i.e., the
+sum of the execution times of the request insertion, dispatch and
+completion hooks---is, e.g., 1.9 us on an Intel Core i7-2760QM@2.40GHz
+(dated CPU for notebooks; time measured with simple code
+instrumentation, and using the throughput-sync.sh script of the S
+suite [1], in performance-profiling mode). To put this result into
+context, the total, single-lock-protected, per-request execution time
+of the lightest I/O scheduler available in blk-mq, mq-deadline, is 0.7
+us (mq-deadline is ~800 LOC, against ~10500 LOC for BFQ).
+
+Scheduling overhead further limits the maximum IOPS that a CPU can
+process (already limited by the execution of the rest of the I/O
+stack). To give an idea of the limits with BFQ, on slow or average
+CPUs, here are, first, the limits of BFQ for three different CPUs, on,
+respectively, an average laptop, an old desktop, and a cheap embedded
+system, in case full hierarchical support is enabled (i.e.,
+CONFIG_BFQ_GROUP_IOSCHED is set), but CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG is not
+set (Section 4-2):
+- Intel i7-4850HQ: 400 KIOPS
+- AMD A8-3850: 250 KIOPS
+- ARM CortexTM-A53 Octa-core: 80 KIOPS
+
+If CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG is set (and of course full hierarchical
+support is enabled), then the sustainable throughput with BFQ
+decreases, because all blkio.bfq* statistics are created and updated
+(Section 4-2). For BFQ, this leads to the following maximum
+sustainable throughputs, on the same systems as above:
+- Intel i7-4850HQ: 310 KIOPS
+- AMD A8-3850: 200 KIOPS
+- ARM CortexTM-A53 Octa-core: 56 KIOPS
+
+BFQ works for multi-queue devices too.
+
+.. The table of contents follow. Impatients can just jump to Section 3.
+
+.. CONTENTS
+
+   1. When may BFQ be useful?
+    1-1 Personal systems
+    1-2 Server systems
+   2. How does BFQ work?
+   3. What are BFQ's tunables and how to properly configure BFQ?
+   4. BFQ group scheduling
+    4-1 Service guarantees provided
+    4-2 Interface
+
+1. When may BFQ be useful?
+==========================
+
+BFQ provides the following benefits on personal and server systems.
+
+1-1 Personal systems
+--------------------
+
+Low latency for interactive applications
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+Regardless of the actual background workload, BFQ guarantees that, for
+interactive tasks, the storage device is virtually as responsive as if
+it was idle. For example, even if one or more of the following
+background workloads are being executed:
+
+- one or more large files are being read, written or copied,
+- a tree of source files is being compiled,
+- one or more virtual machines are performing I/O,
+- a software update is in progress,
+- indexing daemons are scanning filesystems and updating their
+  databases,
+
+starting an application or loading a file from within an application
+takes about the same time as if the storage device was idle. As a
+comparison, with CFQ, NOOP or DEADLINE, and in the same conditions,
+applications experience high latencies, or even become unresponsive
+until the background workload terminates (also on SSDs).
+
+Low latency for soft real-time applications
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+Also soft real-time applications, such as audio and video
+players/streamers, enjoy a low latency and a low drop rate, regardless
+of the background I/O workload. As a consequence, these applications
+do not suffer from almost any glitch due to the background workload.
+
+Higher speed for code-development tasks
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+If some additional workload happens to be executed in parallel, then
+BFQ executes the I/O-related components of typical code-development
+tasks (compilation, checkout, merge, ...) much more quickly than CFQ,
+NOOP or DEADLINE.
+
+High throughput
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+On hard disks, BFQ achieves up to 30% higher throughput than CFQ, and
+up to 150% higher throughput than DEADLINE and NOOP, with all the
+sequential workloads considered in our tests. With random workloads,
+and with all the workloads on flash-based devices, BFQ achieves,
+instead, about the same throughput as the other schedulers.
+
+Strong fairness, bandwidth and delay guarantees
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+BFQ distributes the device throughput, and not just the device time,
+among I/O-bound applications in proportion their weights, with any
+workload and regardless of the device parameters. From these bandwidth
+guarantees, it is possible to compute tight per-I/O-request delay
+guarantees by a simple formula. If not configured for strict service
+guarantees, BFQ switches to time-based resource sharing (only) for
+applications that would otherwise cause a throughput loss.
+
+1-2 Server systems
+------------------
+
+Most benefits for server systems follow from the same service
+properties as above. In particular, regardless of whether additional,
+possibly heavy workloads are being served, BFQ guarantees:
+
+* audio and video-streaming with zero or very low jitter and drop
+  rate;
+
+* fast retrieval of WEB pages and embedded objects;
+
+* real-time recording of data in live-dumping applications (e.g.,
+  packet logging);
+
+* responsiveness in local and remote access to a server.
+
+
+2. How does BFQ work?
+=====================
+
+BFQ is a proportional-share I/O scheduler, whose general structure,
+plus a lot of code, are borrowed from CFQ.
+
+- Each process doing I/O on a device is associated with a weight and a
+  `(bfq_)queue`.
+
+- BFQ grants exclusive access to the device, for a while, to one queue
+  (process) at a time, and implements this service model by
+  associating every queue with a budget, measured in number of
+  sectors.
+
+  - After a queue is granted access to the device, the budget of the
+    queue is decremented, on each request dispatch, by the size of the
+    request.
+
+  - The in-service queue is expired, i.e., its service is suspended,
+    only if one of the following events occurs: 1) the queue finishes
+    its budget, 2) the queue empties, 3) a "budget timeout" fires.
+
+    - The budget timeout prevents processes doing random I/O from
+      holding the device for too long and dramatically reducing
+      throughput.
+
+    - Actually, as in CFQ, a queue associated with a process issuing
+      sync requests may not be expired immediately when it empties. In
+      contrast, BFQ may idle the device for a short time interval,
+      giving the process the chance to go on being served if it issues
+      a new request in time. Device idling typically boosts the
+      throughput on rotational devices and on non-queueing flash-based
+      devices, if processes do synchronous and sequential I/O. In
+      addition, under BFQ, device idling is also instrumental in
+      guaranteeing the desired throughput fraction to processes
+      issuing sync requests (see the description of the slice_idle
+      tunable in this document, or [1, 2], for more details).
+
+      - With respect to idling for service guarantees, if several
+	processes are competing for the device at the same time, but
+	all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ
+	guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever
+	idling the device. Throughput is thus as high as possible in
+	this common scenario.
+
+     - On flash-based storage with internal queueing of commands
+       (typically NCQ), device idling happens to be always detrimental
+       for throughput. So, with these devices, BFQ performs idling
+       only when strictly needed for service guarantees, i.e., for
+       guaranteeing low latency or fairness. In these cases, overall
+       throughput may be sub-optimal. No solution currently exists to
+       provide both strong service guarantees and optimal throughput
+       on devices with internal queueing.
+
+  - If low-latency mode is enabled (default configuration), BFQ
+    executes some special heuristics to detect interactive and soft
+    real-time applications (e.g., video or audio players/streamers),
+    and to reduce their latency. The most important action taken to
+    achieve this goal is to give to the queues associated with these
+    applications more than their fair share of the device
+    throughput. For brevity, we call just "weight-raising" the whole
+    sets of actions taken by BFQ to privilege these queues. In
+    particular, BFQ provides a milder form of weight-raising for
+    interactive applications, and a stronger form for soft real-time
+    applications.
+
+  - BFQ automatically deactivates idling for queues born in a burst of
+    queue creations. In fact, these queues are usually associated with
+    the processes of applications and services that benefit mostly
+    from a high throughput. Examples are systemd during boot, or git
+    grep.
+
+  - As CFQ, BFQ merges queues performing interleaved I/O, i.e.,
+    performing random I/O that becomes mostly sequential if
+    merged. Differently from CFQ, BFQ achieves this goal with a more
+    reactive mechanism, called Early Queue Merge (EQM). EQM is so
+    responsive in detecting interleaved I/O (cooperating processes),
+    that it enables BFQ to achieve a high throughput, by queue
+    merging, even for queues for which CFQ needs a different
+    mechanism, preemption, to get a high throughput. As such EQM is a
+    unified mechanism to achieve a high throughput with interleaved
+    I/O.
+
+  - Queues are scheduled according to a variant of WF2Q+, named
+    B-WF2Q+, and implemented using an augmented rb-tree to preserve an
+    O(log N) overall complexity.  See [2] for more details. B-WF2Q+ is
+    also ready for hierarchical scheduling, details in Section 4.
+
+  - B-WF2Q+ guarantees a tight deviation with respect to an ideal,
+    perfectly fair, and smooth service. In particular, B-WF2Q+
+    guarantees that each queue receives a fraction of the device
+    throughput proportional to its weight, even if the throughput
+    fluctuates, and regardless of: the device parameters, the current
+    workload and the budgets assigned to the queue.
+
+  - The last, budget-independence, property (although probably
+    counterintuitive in the first place) is definitely beneficial, for
+    the following reasons:
+
+    - First, with any proportional-share scheduler, the maximum
+      deviation with respect to an ideal service is proportional to
+      the maximum budget (slice) assigned to queues. As a consequence,
+      BFQ can keep this deviation tight not only because of the
+      accurate service of B-WF2Q+, but also because BFQ *does not*
+      need to assign a larger budget to a queue to let the queue
+      receive a higher fraction of the device throughput.
+
+    - Second, BFQ is free to choose, for every process (queue), the
+      budget that best fits the needs of the process, or best
+      leverages the I/O pattern of the process. In particular, BFQ
+      updates queue budgets with a simple feedback-loop algorithm that
+      allows a high throughput to be achieved, while still providing
+      tight latency guarantees to time-sensitive applications. When
+      the in-service queue expires, this algorithm computes the next
+      budget of the queue so as to:
+
+      - Let large budgets be eventually assigned to the queues
+	associated with I/O-bound applications performing sequential
+	I/O: in fact, the longer these applications are served once
+	got access to the device, the higher the throughput is.
+
+      - Let small budgets be eventually assigned to the queues
+	associated with time-sensitive applications (which typically
+	perform sporadic and short I/O), because, the smaller the
+	budget assigned to a queue waiting for service is, the sooner
+	B-WF2Q+ will serve that queue (Subsec 3.3 in [2]).
+
+- If several processes are competing for the device at the same time,
+  but all processes and groups have the same weight, then BFQ
+  guarantees the expected throughput distribution without ever idling
+  the device. It uses preemption instead. Throughput is then much
+  higher in this common scenario.
+
+- ioprio classes are served in strict priority order, i.e.,
+  lower-priority queues are not served as long as there are
+  higher-priority queues.  Among queues in the same class, the
+  bandwidth is distributed in proportion to the weight of each
+  queue. A very thin extra bandwidth is however guaranteed to
+  the Idle class, to prevent it from starving.
+
+
+3. What are BFQ's tunables and how to properly configure BFQ?
+=============================================================
+
+Most BFQ tunables affect service guarantees (basically latency and
+fairness) and throughput. For full details on how to choose the
+desired tradeoff between service guarantees and throughput, see the
+parameters slice_idle, strict_guarantees and low_latency. For details
+on how to maximise throughput, see slice_idle, timeout_sync and
+max_budget. The other performance-related parameters have been
+inherited from, and have been preserved mostly for compatibility with
+CFQ. So far, no performance improvement has been reported after
+changing the latter parameters in BFQ.
+
+In particular, the tunables back_seek-max, back_seek_penalty,
+fifo_expire_async and fifo_expire_sync below are the same as in
+CFQ. Their description is just copied from that for CFQ. Some
+considerations in the description of slice_idle are copied from CFQ
+too.
+
+per-process ioprio and weight
+-----------------------------
+
+Unless the cgroups interface is used (see "4. BFQ group scheduling"),
+weights can be assigned to processes only indirectly, through I/O
+priorities, and according to the relation:
+weight = (IOPRIO_BE_NR - ioprio) * 10.
+
+Beware that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the
+weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time
+applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights.
+
+slice_idle
+----------
+
+This parameter specifies how long BFQ should idle for next I/O
+request, when certain sync BFQ queues become empty. By default
+slice_idle is a non-zero value. Idling has a double purpose: boosting
+throughput and making sure that the desired throughput distribution is
+respected (see the description of how BFQ works, and, if needed, the
+papers referred there).
+
+As for throughput, idling can be very helpful on highly seeky media
+like single spindle SATA/SAS disks where we can cut down on overall
+number of seeks and see improved throughput.
+
+Setting slice_idle to 0 will remove all the idling on queues and one
+should see an overall improved throughput on faster storage devices
+like multiple SATA/SAS disks in hardware RAID configuration, as well
+as flash-based storage with internal command queueing (and
+parallelism).
+
+So depending on storage and workload, it might be useful to set
+slice_idle=0.  In general for SATA/SAS disks and software RAID of
+SATA/SAS disks keeping slice_idle enabled should be useful. For any
+configurations where there are multiple spindles behind single LUN
+(Host based hardware RAID controller or for storage arrays), or with
+flash-based fast storage, setting slice_idle=0 might end up in better
+throughput and acceptable latencies.
+
+Idling is however necessary to have service guarantees enforced in
+case of differentiated weights or differentiated I/O-request lengths.
+To see why, suppose that a given BFQ queue A must get several I/O
+requests served for each request served for another queue B. Idling
+ensures that, if A makes a new I/O request slightly after becoming
+empty, then no request of B is dispatched in the middle, and thus A
+does not lose the possibility to get more than one request dispatched
+before the next request of B is dispatched. Note that idling
+guarantees the desired differentiated treatment of queues only in
+terms of I/O-request dispatches. To guarantee that the actual service
+order then corresponds to the dispatch order, the strict_guarantees
+tunable must be set too.
+
+There is an important flipside for idling: apart from the above cases
+where it is beneficial also for throughput, idling can severely impact
+throughput. One important case is random workload. Because of this
+issue, BFQ tends to avoid idling as much as possible, when it is not
+beneficial also for throughput (as detailed in Section 2). As a
+consequence of this behavior, and of further issues described for the
+strict_guarantees tunable, short-term service guarantees may be
+occasionally violated. And, in some cases, these guarantees may be
+more important than guaranteeing maximum throughput. For example, in
+video playing/streaming, a very low drop rate may be more important
+than maximum throughput. In these cases, consider setting the
+strict_guarantees parameter.
+
+slice_idle_us
+-------------
+
+Controls the same tuning parameter as slice_idle, but in microseconds.
+Either tunable can be used to set idling behavior.  Afterwards, the
+other tunable will reflect the newly set value in sysfs.
+
+strict_guarantees
+-----------------
+
+If this parameter is set (default: unset), then BFQ
+
+- always performs idling when the in-service queue becomes empty;
+
+- forces the device to serve one I/O request at a time, by dispatching a
+  new request only if there is no outstanding request.
+
+In the presence of differentiated weights or I/O-request sizes, both
+the above conditions are needed to guarantee that every BFQ queue
+receives its allotted share of the bandwidth. The first condition is
+needed for the reasons explained in the description of the slice_idle
+tunable.  The second condition is needed because all modern storage
+devices reorder internally-queued requests, which may trivially break
+the service guarantees enforced by the I/O scheduler.
+
+Setting strict_guarantees may evidently affect throughput.
+
+back_seek_max
+-------------
+
+This specifies, given in Kbytes, the maximum "distance" for backward seeking.
+The distance is the amount of space from the current head location to the
+sectors that are backward in terms of distance.
+
+This parameter allows the scheduler to anticipate requests in the "backward"
+direction and consider them as being the "next" if they are within this
+distance from the current head location.
+
+back_seek_penalty
+-----------------
+
+This parameter is used to compute the cost of backward seeking. If the
+backward distance of request is just 1/back_seek_penalty from a "front"
+request, then the seeking cost of two requests is considered equivalent.
+
+So scheduler will not bias toward one or the other request (otherwise scheduler
+will bias toward front request). Default value of back_seek_penalty is 2.
+
+fifo_expire_async
+-----------------
+
+This parameter is used to set the timeout of asynchronous requests. Default
+value of this is 248ms.
+
+fifo_expire_sync
+----------------
+
+This parameter is used to set the timeout of synchronous requests. Default
+value of this is 124ms. In case to favor synchronous requests over asynchronous
+one, this value should be decreased relative to fifo_expire_async.
+
+low_latency
+-----------
+
+This parameter is used to enable/disable BFQ's low latency mode. By
+default, low latency mode is enabled. If enabled, interactive and soft
+real-time applications are privileged and experience a lower latency,
+as explained in more detail in the description of how BFQ works.
+
+DISABLE this mode if you need full control on bandwidth
+distribution. In fact, if it is enabled, then BFQ automatically
+increases the bandwidth share of privileged applications, as the main
+means to guarantee a lower latency to them.
+
+In addition, as already highlighted at the beginning of this document,
+DISABLE this mode if your only goal is to achieve a high throughput.
+In fact, privileging the I/O of some application over the rest may
+entail a lower throughput. To achieve the highest-possible throughput
+on a non-rotational device, setting slice_idle to 0 may be needed too
+(at the cost of giving up any strong guarantee on fairness and low
+latency).
+
+timeout_sync
+------------
+
+Maximum amount of device time that can be given to a task (queue) once
+it has been selected for service. On devices with costly seeks,
+increasing this time usually increases maximum throughput. On the
+opposite end, increasing this time coarsens the granularity of the
+short-term bandwidth and latency guarantees, especially if the
+following parameter is set to zero.
+
+max_budget
+----------
+
+Maximum amount of service, measured in sectors, that can be provided
+to a BFQ queue once it is set in service (of course within the limits
+of the above timeout). According to what said in the description of
+the algorithm, larger values increase the throughput in proportion to
+the percentage of sequential I/O requests issued. The price of larger
+values is that they coarsen the granularity of short-term bandwidth
+and latency guarantees.
+
+The default value is 0, which enables auto-tuning: BFQ sets max_budget
+to the maximum number of sectors that can be served during
+timeout_sync, according to the estimated peak rate.
+
+For specific devices, some users have occasionally reported to have
+reached a higher throughput by setting max_budget explicitly, i.e., by
+setting max_budget to a higher value than 0. In particular, they have
+set max_budget to higher values than those to which BFQ would have set
+it with auto-tuning. An alternative way to achieve this goal is to
+just increase the value of timeout_sync, leaving max_budget equal to 0.
+
+4. Group scheduling with BFQ
+============================
+
+BFQ supports both cgroups-v1 and cgroups-v2 io controllers, namely
+blkio and io. In particular, BFQ supports weight-based proportional
+share. To activate cgroups support, set BFQ_GROUP_IOSCHED.
+
+4-1 Service guarantees provided
+-------------------------------
+
+With BFQ, proportional share means true proportional share of the
+device bandwidth, according to group weights. For example, a group
+with weight 200 gets twice the bandwidth, and not just twice the time,
+of a group with weight 100.
+
+BFQ supports hierarchies (group trees) of any depth. Bandwidth is
+distributed among groups and processes in the expected way: for each
+group, the children of the group share the whole bandwidth of the
+group in proportion to their weights. In particular, this implies
+that, for each leaf group, every process of the group receives the
+same share of the whole group bandwidth, unless the ioprio of the
+process is modified.
+
+The resource-sharing guarantee for a group may partially or totally
+switch from bandwidth to time, if providing bandwidth guarantees to
+the group lowers the throughput too much. This switch occurs on a
+per-process basis: if a process of a leaf group causes throughput loss
+if served in such a way to receive its share of the bandwidth, then
+BFQ switches back to just time-based proportional share for that
+process.
+
+4-2 Interface
+-------------
+
+To get proportional sharing of bandwidth with BFQ for a given device,
+BFQ must of course be the active scheduler for that device.
+
+Within each group directory, the names of the files associated with
+BFQ-specific cgroup parameters and stats begin with the "bfq."
+prefix. So, with cgroups-v1 or cgroups-v2, the full prefix for
+BFQ-specific files is "blkio.bfq." or "io.bfq." For example, the group
+parameter to set the weight of a group with BFQ is blkio.bfq.weight
+or io.bfq.weight.
+
+As for cgroups-v1 (blkio controller), the exact set of stat files
+created, and kept up-to-date by bfq, depends on whether
+CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG is set. If it is set, then bfq creates all
+the stat files documented in
+Documentation/admin-guide/cgroup-v1/blkio-controller.rst. If, instead,
+CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG is not set, then bfq creates only the files::
+
+  blkio.bfq.io_service_bytes
+  blkio.bfq.io_service_bytes_recursive
+  blkio.bfq.io_serviced
+  blkio.bfq.io_serviced_recursive
+
+The value of CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG greatly influences the maximum
+throughput sustainable with bfq, because updating the blkio.bfq.*
+stats is rather costly, especially for some of the stats enabled by
+CONFIG_BFQ_CGROUP_DEBUG.
+
+Parameters to set
+-----------------
+
+For each group, there is only the following parameter to set.
+
+weight (namely blkio.bfq.weight or io.bfq-weight): the weight of the
+group inside its parent. Available values: 1..1000 (default 100). The
+linear mapping between ioprio and weights, described at the beginning
+of the tunable section, is still valid, but all weights higher than
+IOPRIO_BE_NR*10 are mapped to ioprio 0.
+
+Recall that, if low-latency is set, then BFQ automatically raises the
+weight of the queues associated with interactive and soft real-time
+applications. Unset this tunable if you need/want to control weights.
+
+
+[1]
+    P. Valente, A. Avanzini, "Evolution of the BFQ Storage I/O
+    Scheduler", Proceedings of the First Workshop on Mobile System
+    Technologies (MST-2015), May 2015.
+
+    http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/mst-2015.pdf
+
+[2]
+    P. Valente and M. Andreolini, "Improving Application
+    Responsiveness with the BFQ Disk I/O Scheduler", Proceedings of
+    the 5th Annual International Systems and Storage Conference
+    (SYSTOR '12), June 2012.
+
+    Slightly extended version:
+
+    http://algogroup.unimore.it/people/paolo/disk_sched/bfq-v1-suite-results.pdf
+
+[3]
+   https://github.com/Algodev-github/S