Hi... in recent tests we are seeing a 50% drop in performance from XFS>MD on a 2.6.30 kernel (compared to a 2.6.28 kernel) In short: Performance to MD0 direct = circa 1.7GBsec (see below), via xfs circa 850MBsec. On previous system (2.6.28) there was no drop in performance (in fact often an increase). I am hopefully that this is simply a matter of barriers etc on the newer kernel and MD, but we have tried many options and nothing seems to change this so would very much appreciate advice. Below is the configuration / test results Hardware: Decent performance quad core with LSI SAS controller: 10 x 15K SAS drives (note we have tried this on various hardware and various amounts of drives). Newer kernel setup (performance drop) Kernel 2.6.30.8 (open SUSE userspace) mdadm - v3.0 - 2nd June 2009 Library version: 1.02.31 (2009-03-03) Driver version: 4.14.0 RAID0 created: mdadm -C /dev/md0 -l0 -n10 /dev/sd[b-k] RAID0 Performance: dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/md0 bs=1M count=20000 20000+0 records in 20000+0 records out 20971520000 bytes (21 GB) copied, 12.6685 s, 1.7 GB/s XFS Created: (can see from output it is self aligning - but tried various alignments) # mkfs.xfs -f /dev/md0 meta-data=/dev/md0 isize=256 agcount=32, agsize=22888176 blks = sectsz=512 attr=2 data = bsize=4096 blocks=732421600, imaxpct=5 = sunit=16 swidth=160 blks naming =version 2 bsize=4096 ascii-ci=0 log =internal log bsize=4096 blocks=32768, version=2 = sectsz=512 sunit=16 blks, lazy-count=0 realtime =none extsz=655360 blocks=0, rtextents=0 Mounted: mount -o nobarrier /dev/md0 /mnt/md0 /dev/md0 on /mnt/md0 type xfs (rw,nobarrier) (tried with barriers / async) Performance: linux-poly:~ # dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/md0/test bs=1M count=20000 20000+0 records in 20000+0 records out 20971520000 bytes (21 GB) copied, 23.631 s, 887 MB/s Note: Older kernel setup (no performance drop) Newer kernel setup Kernel 2.6.28.4 mdadm 2.6.8 Library version: 1.02.27 (2008-06-25) Driver version: 4.14.0 -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html