I'm bisecting now, there are a couple of patches from Ming in the area of the bio splitting code... CC'ing Ming, Linux-block and Linux-nvme as iser is identical to nvme wrt the virtual boundary so I think nvme will break as well.
Bisection reveals that this one is the culprit: commit 52cc6eead9095e2faf2ec7afc013aa3af1f01ac5 Author: Ming Lei <ming.lei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu Sep 17 09:58:38 2015 -0600 block: blk-merge: fast-clone bio when splitting rw bios biovecs has become immutable since v3.13, so it isn't necessary to allocate biovecs for the new cloned bios, then we can save one extra biovecs allocation/copy, and the allocation is often not fixed-length and a bit more expensive. For example, if the 'max_sectors_kb' of null blk's queue is set as 16(32 sectors) via sysfs just for making more splits, this patch can increase throught about ~70% in the sequential read test over null_blk(direct io, bs: 1M). Cc: Christoph Hellwig <hch@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet@xxxxxxxxx> Cc: Ming Lin <ming.l@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: Dongsu Park <dpark@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Ming Lei <ming.lei@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> This fixes a performance regression introduced by commit 54efd50bfd, and allows us to take full advantage of the fact that we have immutable bio_vecs. Hand applied, as it rejected violently with commit 5014c311baa2. Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <axboe@xxxxxx> -- -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-block" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html