Mike Christie wrote:
Vladislav Bolkhovitin wrote:
- Scst has some performance advantages over stgt, at least, on
hardware targets, because it allows internal handling in SIRQ context
as well as doesn't need user space program, so it eliminates additi
switches (at least 3 per command for WRITEs and 2 per command for
reads plus switches to user space daemon, probably, 2 per command). 5
context switches per command looks too much for me, especially
considering how little work is done on each context. It means ~15000
CS/sec on regular 200Mb/sec link with 64K block size. Additionally,
kernel only commands execution allows direct access to page cache,
which is GREAT performance improvement, because in architecture with
user space daemon the data should be copied several times between
kernel and user space. Or, do I miss anything?
Userspace only occurs for READ/WRITEs. So for REPORT_LUNS, TUR, etc
where performance is not a factor.
So, do you mean that READ/WRITE operations are (or will be) performed in
kernel space only? I don't see that from the code.
Also is the page cache comment in reference to us using the page cache
for our reads and writes or I am not sure why you wrote that if you do
not do it right now.
Hm, at first, the page cache already used somehow in fileio dev handler
(though, with additional mem copy). At the second, fully utilize the
page cache is one of two major improvements that are pending in scst,
because it is required changing the kernel, which until some moment try
to avoid. Although I prepared what is necessary for that.
The idea basically is the following. When READ operation arrives, pages
for all requested blocks are at first searched in the page cache
(probably, in SIRQ context, because it isn't expensive operation) and if
all pages are found, they are referenced and the result will be sent to
the initiator. Then the pages will be dereferenced (so, no pages
allocation will be done at all). Otherwise, the missed pages will be
allocated and the command will be rescheduled to the thread, which will
read them. Then, after the response is sent, the pages will remain in
the page cache for future accesses. For WRITEs the processing is the
similar, the pages with the data will be put in the page cache.
I doubt it is possible to implement such simple and effective algorithm
via user space. Pages mapping and unmapping is quite expensive for both
coding effort and performance.
From other side, stgt has not too much advantages over scst.
Hey, we just started and have not had too much time.
No offense, please, you wrote stgt and scst are the same, I wrote, they
aren't :-)
Actually, we would greatly appreciate if Mike or Christoph will tell
us what is so wrong in scst on their opinion, so they started they own
new project. (I'm not considering motivation like "I want to make my
own in any case" seriously). Is scst too complicated? Do you think
stgt will be simpler with all those features implemented?
Didn't we go over this? To get SCST ready for mainline we would have had
a large cleanup effort. I started this and sent you a patch to begin the
cleanup. In the end some of the scsi people liked the idea of throwing
the non-read/write command to userspace and to do this we just decided
to start over but I have been cutting and pasting your code and cleaning
it up as I add more stuff.
The patches that I've seen were just pretty mechanic cleanups and
renames, which could be done in a half of hour time and which I'm going
to do in any case before preparing the patch. So, that reason doesn't
look convincing for me to throw away a big chunk of working code. Doing
so you delayed SCSI targets development for at least to a year-two,
because there are too much features for you to implement in stgt, which
are already working and useful in scst.
From other side, if you look on scst closely you will see that:
- The user space gate could be easily and clearly done using existing
dev handler's hooks
- There is nothing in current SCST that could be moved in user space
without sacrificing performance. Neither task management, nor UA
processing, nor RESERVE/RELEASE emulation. Otherwise, you will have to
pass *all* the commands to the user space to check allowed this command
for processing or it shall be returned with an error. SCST core is just
about 7500 lines of code. Is it too much?
So, in my opinion, there is/was no technical point to drop scst in favor
of stgt.
Simmer down :) If you had just gotton your code ready when christoph
asked a year ago we would never have had this problem and I would be
sending you patches to remove the scsi_request usage as we speak.
Christoph didn't ask me to do anything. Actually, nobody contacted and
asked anything about that me when you with Christoph conceived stgt.
Vlad
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