Vivek Goyal <vgoyal@xxxxxxxxxx> writes: > On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 04:18:07AM -0500, Christoph Hellwig wrote: >> On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 10:36:53PM -0500, Vivek Goyal wrote: >> > I still see that IO is being submitted one page at a time. The only >> > real difference seems to be that queue unplug happening at random times >> > and many a times we are submitting much smaller requests (40 sectors, 48 >> > sectors etc). >> >> This is expected given that the block device node uses >> block_read_full_page, and not mpage_readpage(s). > > What is the difference between block_read_full_page() and > mpage_readpage(). IOW, why block device does not use mpage_readpage(s) > interface? > > Is enabling mpage_readpages() on block devices is as simple as following > patch or more is involved? (I suspect it has to be more than this. If it > was this simple, it would have been done by now). > > This patch complies and seems to work. (system does not crash and dd > seems to be working. I can't verify the contents of the file though). > > Applying following patch improved the speed from 110MB/s to more than > 230MB/s. > > # dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1K > 1024+0 records in > 1024+0 records out > 1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 4.6269 s, 232 MB/s See: commit db2dbb12dc47a50c7a4c5678f526014063e486f6 Author: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Wed Apr 22 14:08:13 2009 +0200 block: implement blkdev_readpages Doing a proper block dev ->readpages() speeds up the crazy dump(8) approach of using interleaved process IO. Signed-off-by: Jeff Moyer <jmoyer@xxxxxxxxxx> Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx> And: commit 172124e220f1854acc99ee394671781b8b5e2120 Author: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Thu Jun 4 22:34:44 2009 +0200 Revert "block: implement blkdev_readpages" This reverts commit db2dbb12dc47a50c7a4c5678f526014063e486f6. It apparently causes problems with partition table read-ahead on archs with large page sizes. Until that problem is diagnosed further, just drop the readpages support on block devices. Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@xxxxxxxxxx> ;-) Cheers, Jeff -- To unsubscribe, send a message with 'unsubscribe linux-mm' in the body to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx. For more info on Linux MM, see: http://www.linux-mm.org/ . Fight unfair telecom internet charges in Canada: sign http://stopthemeter.ca/ Don't email: <a href=mailto:"dont@xxxxxxxxx"> email@xxxxxxxxx </a>