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Date:      Thu, 03 Sep 2009 19:08:02 +0300
From:      Alexander Motin <mav@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Scott Long <scottl@samsco.org>
Cc:        svn-src-head@FreeBSD.org, svn-src-all@FreeBSD.org, src-committers@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r196777 - head/sys/dev/ahci
Message-ID:  <4A9FE9E2.1060205@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20090903095224.N20031@pooker.samsco.org>
References:  <200909031237.n83CbIgk032551@svn.freebsd.org> <1872D962-9297-4C45-9F73-4BB823C49D74@samsco.org> <4A9FD8B4.2080605@FreeBSD.org> <20090903095224.N20031@pooker.samsco.org>

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Scott Long wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Sep 2009, Alexander Motin wrote:
>> Scott Long wrote:
>>> In this case, set maxio to 64k, not 127.5k.  You'll typically get 
>>> much better i/o performance out of two 64k transfers
>>> than you will out of one 127.k transfer and one 512 bytes transfer, 
>>> which is what the block layer will give you if
>>> you try to send 128k.
>>
>> Couldn't it be somehow handled on that level?
> 
> It's a limitation of the paticular hardware, not the OS.  Plain disks 
> will behave like this, but RAID controllers might now.  But if you want 
> to add this feature to the upper layers, be my guest.

Huh. May be sometimes later.

>> Limiting maxio from 127.5K to 64K is also a penalty for requests with 
>> length in that range.
> 
> Most I/O that goes to a disk comes from one of the VM pagers, and is 
> thus page aligned and multi-of-page sized.  Breaking one of these 
> requests up into sub-page sized requests costs a whole lot more than 
> what you are assuming.  We analyzed exactly this situation a few years 
> ago at Yahoo and came to this conclusion.

Sure, 127.5K is ugly, but what's about 96K or 112K? Is there benefits 
having it strictly in power of 2?

-- 
Alexander Motin



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