block: recursive merge requests

In a workload, thread 1 accesses a, a+2, ..., thread 2 accesses a+1, a+3,....
When the requests are flushed to queue, a and a+1 are merged to (a, a+1), a+2
and a+3 too to (a+2, a+3), but (a, a+1) and (a+2, a+3) aren't merged.

If we do recursive merge for such interleave access, some workloads throughput
get improvement. A recent worload I'm checking on is swap, below change
boostes the throughput around 5% ~ 10%.

Signed-off-by: Shaohua Li <shli@fusionio.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>
1 file changed