block: Added in stricter no merge semantics for block I/O

Updated 'nomerges' tunable to accept a value of '2' - indicating that _no_
merges at all are to be attempted (not even the simple one-hit cache).

The following table illustrates the additional benefit - 5 minute runs of
a random I/O load were applied to a dozen devices on a 16-way x86_64 system.

nomerges        Throughput      %System         Improvement (tput / %sys)
--------        ------------    -----------     -------------------------
0               12.45 MB/sec    0.669365609
1               12.50 MB/sec    0.641519199     0.40% / 2.71%
2               12.52 MB/sec    0.639849750     0.56% / 2.96%

Signed-off-by: Alan D. Brunelle <alan.brunelle@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
This commit is contained in:
Alan D. Brunelle
2010-01-29 09:04:08 +01:00
committed by Jens Axboe
parent 47483e2520
commit 488991e28e
5 changed files with 39 additions and 10 deletions

View File

@@ -25,11 +25,11 @@ size allowed by the hardware.
nomerges (RW)
-------------
This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO merging
requests in the block layer. Merging may still occur through a direct
1-hit cache, since that comes for (almost) free. The IO scheduler will not
waste cycles doing tree/hash lookups for merges if nomerges is 1. Defaults
to 0, enabling all merges.
This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO
merging requests in the block layer. By default (0) all merges are
enabled. When set to 1 only simple one-hit merges will be tried. When
set to 2 no merge algorithms will be tried (including one-hit or more
complex tree/hash lookups).
nr_requests (RW)
----------------