Re: [PLEASE-TESTME] Zerocopy networking patch, 2.4.0-1

[Andrea Arcangeli]

On Tue, Jan 09, 2001 at 07:38:28PM +0100, Ingo Molnar wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Jens Axboe wrote:
> 
> > > > ever seen, this is why i quoted it - the talk was about block-IO
> > > > performance, and Stephen said that our block IO sucks. It used to suck,
> > > > but in 2.4, with the right patch from Jens, it doesnt suck anymore. )
> > >
> > > Thats fine. Get me 128K-512K chunks nicely streaming into my raid controller
> > > and I'll be a happy man
> >
> > No problem, apply blk-13B and you'll get 512K chunks for SCSI and RAID.
> 
> i cannot agree more - Jens' patch did wonders to IO performance here. It

BTW, I noticed what is left in blk-13B seems to be my work (Jens's fixes for
merging when the I/O queue is full are just been integrated in test1x). The
512K SCSI command, wake_up_nr, elevator fixes and cleanups and removal of the
bogus 64 max_segment limit in scsi.c that matters only with the IOMMU to allow
devices with sg_tablesize <64 to do SG with 64 segments were all thought and
implemented by me. My last public patch with most of the blk-13B stuff in it
was here:

	ftp://ftp.us.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/andrea/patches/2.4.0-test7/blkdev-3

I sumbitted a later revision of the above blkdev-3 to Jens and he kept nicely
maintaining it in sync with 2.4.x-latest.

My blkdev tree is even more advanced but I didn't had time to update with 2.4.0
and marge it with Jens yet (I just described to Jens what "more advanced"
means though, in practice it means something like a x2 speedup in tiotest seek
write numbers, streaming I/O doesn't change on highmem boxes but it doesn't
hurt lowmem boxes anymore). Current blk-13B isn't ok for integration yet
because it hurts with lowmem (try with mem=32m with your scsi array that gets
512K*512 requests in flight :) and it's not able to exploit the elevator as
well as my tree even on highmemory machines. So I'd wait until I merge the last
bits with Jens (I raised the QUEUE_NR_REQUESTS to 3000) before inclusion.

Confirm Jens?

Andrea