Hi Jens,
If the same test case is run with RWF_UNCACHED set for the buffered read, the output looks as follows: Reading bs 65536, uncached 0 1s: 153144MB/sec 2s: 156760MB/sec 3s: 158110MB/sec 4s: 158009MB/sec 5s: 158043MB/sec 6s: 157638MB/sec 7s: 157999MB/sec 8s: 158024MB/sec 9s: 157764MB/sec 10s: 157477MB/sec 11s: 157417MB/sec 12s: 157455MB/sec 13s: 157233MB/sec 14s: 156692MB/sec which is just chugging along at ~155GB/sec of read performance. Looking at top, we see: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 7961 root 20 0 267004 0 0 S 3180 0.0 5:37.95 uncached 8024 axboe 20 0 14292 4096 0 R 1.0 0.0 0:00.13 top where just the test app is using CPU, no reclaim is taking place outside of the main thread. Not only is performance 65% better, it's also using half the CPU to do it.
Do you have numbers of similar code using O_DIRECT just to see the impact of the memcpy from the page cache to the userspace buffer... Thanks! metze