Jens, I'm experimenting here with trying to generate large I/O through libata, and not having much luck. The limit seems to be the number of hardware PRD (SG) entries permitted by the driver (libata:ata_piix), which is 128 by default. The problem is, the block layer *never* sends an SG entry larger than 8192 bytes, and even that size is exceptionally rare. Nearly all I/O segments are 4096 bytes, so I never see a single I/O larger than 512KB (128 * 4096). If I patch various parts of block and SCSI, this limit doesn't budge, but when I change the hardware PRD limit in libata, it scales by exactly whatever I set the new value to. This tells me that adjacent I/O segments are not being combined. I thought that QUEUE_FLAG_CLUSTER (aka. SCSI host .use_clustering=1) should result in adjacent single pages being combined into larger physical segments? This is x86-32 with latest 2.6.24-rc*. I'll re-test on older kernels next. ??? - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
