On Tue, 26 May 2009 08:29:53 +0200 Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Tue, May 26 2009, FUJITA Tomonori wrote: > > On Mon, 25 May 2009 18:45:25 -0700 > > Roland Dreier <rdreier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > > Ideally there should be a MACRO that is defined to WORD_SIZE on cache-coherent > > > > ARCHs and to SMP_CACHE_BYTES on none-cache-coherent systems and use that size > > > > at the __align() attribute. (So only stupid ARCHES get hurt) > > > > > > this seems to come up repeatedly -- I had a proposal a _long_ time ago > > > that never quite got merged, cf http://lwn.net/Articles/2265/ and > > > http://lwn.net/Articles/2269/ -- from 2002 (!?). The idea is to go a > > > > Yeah, I think that Benjamin did last time: > > > > http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-scsi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/msg12632.html > > > > IIRC, James didn't like it so I wrote the current code. I didn't see > > any big performance difference with scsi_debug: > > > > http://marc.info/?l=linux-scsi&m=120038907123706&w=2 > > > > Jens, you see the performance difference due to this unification? > > Yes, it's definitely a worth while optimization. The problem isn't as > such this specific allocation, it's the total number of allocations we > do for a piece of IO. This sense buffer one is just one of many, I'm > continually working to reduce them. If we get rid of this one and add > the ->alloc_cmd() stuff, we can kill one more. The bio path already lost > one. So in the IO stack, we went from 6 allocations to 3 for a piece of > IO. And then it starts to add up. Even at just 30-50k iops, that's more > than 1% of time in the testing I did. I see, thanks. Hmm, possibly slab becomes slower. ;) Then I think that we need something like the ->alloc_cmd() method. Let's ask James. I don't think that it's just about simply adding the hook; there are some issues that we need to think about. Though Boaz worries too much a bit, I think. I'm not sure about this patch if we add ->alloc_cmd(). I doubt that there are any llds don't use ->alloc_cmd() worry about the overhead of the separated sense buffer allocation. If a lld doesn't define the own alloc_cmd, then I think it's fine to use the generic command allocator that does the separate sense buffer allocation. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html