linux/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block
Alan D. Brunelle 488991e28e 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>
2010-01-29 09:04:08 +01:00

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What: /sys/block/<disk>/stat
Date: February 2008
Contact: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Description:
The /sys/block/<disk>/stat files displays the I/O
statistics of disk <disk>. They contain 11 fields:
1 - reads completed successfully
2 - reads merged
3 - sectors read
4 - time spent reading (ms)
5 - writes completed
6 - writes merged
7 - sectors written
8 - time spent writing (ms)
9 - I/Os currently in progress
10 - time spent doing I/Os (ms)
11 - weighted time spent doing I/Os (ms)
For more details refer Documentation/iostats.txt
What: /sys/block/<disk>/<part>/stat
Date: February 2008
Contact: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Description:
The /sys/block/<disk>/<part>/stat files display the
I/O statistics of partition <part>. The format is the
same as the above-written /sys/block/<disk>/stat
format.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/integrity/format
Date: June 2008
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Metadata format for integrity capable block device.
E.g. T10-DIF-TYPE1-CRC.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/integrity/read_verify
Date: June 2008
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Indicates whether the block layer should verify the
integrity of read requests serviced by devices that
support sending integrity metadata.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/integrity/tag_size
Date: June 2008
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Number of bytes of integrity tag space available per
512 bytes of data.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/integrity/write_generate
Date: June 2008
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Indicates whether the block layer should automatically
generate checksums for write requests bound for
devices that support receiving integrity metadata.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/alignment_offset
Date: April 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Storage devices may report a physical block size that is
bigger than the logical block size (for instance a drive
with 4KB physical sectors exposing 512-byte logical
blocks to the operating system). This parameter
indicates how many bytes the beginning of the device is
offset from the disk's natural alignment.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/<partition>/alignment_offset
Date: April 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Storage devices may report a physical block size that is
bigger than the logical block size (for instance a drive
with 4KB physical sectors exposing 512-byte logical
blocks to the operating system). This parameter
indicates how many bytes the beginning of the partition
is offset from the disk's natural alignment.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/queue/logical_block_size
Date: May 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
This is the smallest unit the storage device can
address. It is typically 512 bytes.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/queue/physical_block_size
Date: May 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
This is the smallest unit a physical storage device can
write atomically. It is usually the same as the logical
block size but may be bigger. One example is SATA
drives with 4KB sectors that expose a 512-byte logical
block size to the operating system. For stacked block
devices the physical_block_size variable contains the
maximum physical_block_size of the component devices.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/queue/minimum_io_size
Date: April 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Storage devices may report a granularity or preferred
minimum I/O size which is the smallest request the
device can perform without incurring a performance
penalty. For disk drives this is often the physical
block size. For RAID arrays it is often the stripe
chunk size. A properly aligned multiple of
minimum_io_size is the preferred request size for
workloads where a high number of I/O operations is
desired.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/queue/optimal_io_size
Date: April 2009
Contact: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Description:
Storage devices may report an optimal I/O size, which is
the device's preferred unit for sustained I/O. This is
rarely reported for disk drives. For RAID arrays it is
usually the stripe width or the internal track size. A
properly aligned multiple of optimal_io_size is the
preferred request size for workloads where sustained
throughput is desired. If no optimal I/O size is
reported this file contains 0.
What: /sys/block/<disk>/queue/nomerges
Date: January 2010
Contact:
Description:
Standard I/O elevator operations include attempts to
merge contiguous I/Os. For known random I/O loads these
attempts will always fail and result in extra cycles
being spent in the kernel. This allows one to turn off
this behavior on one of two ways: When set to 1, complex
merge checks are disabled, but the simple one-shot merges
with the previous I/O request are enabled. When set to 2,
all merge tries are disabled. The default value is 0 -
which enables all types of merge tries.