Mark Lord wrote:
(resending with corrected email address for Jens)
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.
...
Problem confirmed. 2.6.23.8 regularly generates segments up to 64KB for libata,
but 2.6.24 uses only 4KB segments and a *few* 8KB segments.
???
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