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author | Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz> | 2010-10-28 00:15:57 +0200 |
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committer | Michal Marek <mmarek@suse.cz> | 2010-10-28 00:15:57 +0200 |
commit | b74b953b998bcc2db91b694446f3a2619ec32de6 (patch) | |
tree | 6ce24caabd730f6ae9287ed0676ec32e6ff31e9d /Documentation/block | |
parent | abb438526201c6a79949ad45375c051b6681c253 (diff) | |
parent | f6f94e2ab1b33f0082ac22d71f66385a60d8157f (diff) | |
download | linux-b74b953b998bcc2db91b694446f3a2619ec32de6.tar.bz2 |
Merge commit 'v2.6.36' into kbuild/misc
Update to be able to fix a recent change to scripts/basic/docproc.c
(commit eda603f).
Diffstat (limited to 'Documentation/block')
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/block/biodoc.txt | 6 | ||||
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt | 45 | ||||
-rw-r--r-- | Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt | 10 |
3 files changed, 53 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt b/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt index 6fab97ea7e6b..b9a83dd24732 100644 --- a/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt +++ b/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt @@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Notes Written on Jan 15, 2002: Last Updated May 2, 2002 September 2003: Updated I/O Scheduler portions - Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au> + Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk> Introduction: @@ -1162,8 +1162,8 @@ where a driver received a request ala this before: As mentioned, there is no virtual mapping of a bio. For DMA, this is not a problem as the driver probably never will need a virtual mapping. -Instead it needs a bus mapping (pci_map_page for a single segment or -use blk_rq_map_sg for scatter gather) to be able to ship it to the driver. For +Instead it needs a bus mapping (dma_map_page for a single segment or +use dma_map_sg for scatter gather) to be able to ship it to the driver. For PIO drivers (or drivers that need to revert to PIO transfer once in a while (IDE for example)), where the CPU is doing the actual data transfer a virtual mapping is needed. If the driver supports highmem I/O, diff --git a/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt b/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt new file mode 100644 index 000000000000..e578feed6d81 --- /dev/null +++ b/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt @@ -0,0 +1,45 @@ +CFQ ioscheduler tunables +======================== + +slice_idle +---------- +This specifies how long CFQ should idle for next request on certain cfq queues +(for sequential workloads) and service trees (for random workloads) before +queue is expired and CFQ selects next queue to dispatch from. + +By default slice_idle is a non-zero value. That means by default we idle on +queues/service trees. This 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/service tree +level and one should see an overall improved throughput on faster storage +devices like multiple SATA/SAS disks in hardware RAID configuration. The down +side is that isolation provided from WRITES also goes down and notion of +IO priority becomes weaker. + +So depending on storage and workload, it might be useful to set slice_idle=0. +In general I think 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), setting slice_idle=0 might end up in better +throughput and acceptable latencies. + +CFQ IOPS Mode for group scheduling +=================================== +Basic CFQ design is to provide priority based time slices. Higher priority +process gets bigger time slice and lower priority process gets smaller time +slice. Measuring time becomes harder if storage is fast and supports NCQ and +it would be better to dispatch multiple requests from multiple cfq queues in +request queue at a time. In such scenario, it is not possible to measure time +consumed by single queue accurately. + +What is possible though is to measure number of requests dispatched from a +single queue and also allow dispatch from multiple cfq queue at the same time. +This effectively becomes the fairness in terms of IOPS (IO operations per +second). + +If one sets slice_idle=0 and if storage supports NCQ, CFQ internally switches +to IOPS mode and starts providing fairness in terms of number of requests +dispatched. Note that this mode switching takes effect only for group +scheduling. For non-cgroup users nothing should change. diff --git a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt index e164403f60e1..f65274081c8d 100644 --- a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt +++ b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt @@ -25,11 +25,11 @@ size allowed by the hardware. nomerges (RW) ------------- -This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO merging -requests in the block layer. Merging may still occur through a direct -1-hit cache, since that comes for (almost) free. The IO scheduler will not -waste cycles doing tree/hash lookups for merges if nomerges is 1. Defaults -to 0, enabling all merges. +This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO +merging requests in the block layer. By default (0) all merges are +enabled. When set to 1 only simple one-hit merges will be tried. When +set to 2 no merge algorithms will be tried (including one-hit or more +complex tree/hash lookups). nr_requests (RW) ---------------- |