Hello, On Mon, May 28, 2012 at 05:27:33PM -0400, Mikulas Patocka wrote: > > They're split and made in-flight together. > > I was talking about old ATA disk (without command queueing). So the > requests are not sent together. USB 2 may be a similar case, it has > limited transfer size and it doesn't have command queueing too. I meant in the block layer. For consecutive commands, queueing doesn't really matter. > > Disk will most likely seek to the sector read all of them into buffer > > at once and then serve the two consecutive commands back-to-back > > without much inter-command delay. > > Without command queueing, the disk will serve the first request, then > receive the second request, and then serve the second request (hopefully > the data would be already prefetched after the first request). > > The point is that while the disk is processing the second request, the CPU > can already process data from the first request. Those are transfer latencies - multiple orders of magnitude shorter than IO latencies. It would be surprising if they actually are noticeable with any kind of disk bound workload. > > Isn't it more like you shouldn't be sending read requested by user and > > read ahead in the same bio? > > If the user calls read with 512 bytes, you would send bio for just one > sector. That's too small and you'd get worse performance because of higher > command overhead. You need to send larger bios. All modern FSes are page granular, so the granularity would be per-page. Also, RAHEAD is treated differently in terms of error-handling. Do filesystems implement their own rahead (independent from the common logic in vfs layer) on their own? > AHCI can interrupt after partial transfer (so for example you can send a > command to read 1M, but signal interrupt after the first 4k was > transferred), but no one really wrote code that could use this feature. It > is questionable if this would improve performance because it would double > interrupt load. The feature is pointless for disks anyway. Think about the scales of latencies of different phases of command processing. The difference is multiple orders of magnitude. > > If exposing segmenting limit upwards is a must (I'm kinda skeptical), > > let's have proper hints (or dynamic hinting interface) instead. > > With this patchset, you don't have to expose all the limits. You can > expose just a few most useful limits to avoid bio split in the cases > described above. Yeah, if that actually helps, sure. From what I read, dm is already (ab)using merge_bvec_fn() like that anyway. Thanks. -- tejun -- 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
