Re: hdparm -tT reports "suspicious results" ???

[Chuck Ebbert]

Mark Hahn wrote:

>does "PII ODP" mean a PII in an adapter that fits into a P6 socket?

It is a factory Intel PII/333 with an HSF that fits in Socket 8.
With its 512K full-speed cache it makes a PPro into a half-decent machine.
Too bad they're so rare...

>> /dev/hde:
>>  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  2.62 seconds = 48.85 MB/sec
>
> hmm, slower dram and/or FSB.

No, same exact machine in _every_ way, just a different kernel.  It is
slow ECC EDO memory, though.

>> /dev/hde:
>>  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  2.66 seconds = 48.14 MB/sec
>>  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  3.90 seconds = 16.41 MB/sec.>
>
> dram is still slow, but disk appears slower yet, so not obviously
> contaminating the measurement.

..and that's 2.5 which measures much lower but doesn't seem to be that

slow (still not tested, I'm testing RAID1 patches on 2.4 now.)

> 53073H4, ecs k7s6a-pro, athlon/"1800", DDR:
> /dev/hda:
>  Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.48 seconds =266.67 MB/sec
>  Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.04 seconds = 31.37 MB/sec

3 x 33073H3, RAID1, Abit KT7A-RAID, Tbird 1333, PC133 SDRAM:

Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] 
read_ahead 24 sectors
md2 : active raid1 hdg9[0] hde8[2] hda8[1]
      2409600 blocks [3/3] [UUU]

2.4.21-pre6:
/dev/md2:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.58 seconds =220.69 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  2.71 seconds = 23.62 MB/sec

2.4.20aa1ce1(unreleased):
/dev/md2:
 Timing buffer-cache reads:   128 MB in  0.59 seconds =216.95 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  64 MB in  1.67 seconds = 38.32 MB/sec

I have RAID1 patches that give 55% sequential IO improvements on K7 but
they're not showing the same gains on the PPro (<20% so far.)  Kernel,
chipset, CPU and disk controller are all different, though I expected
to get proportional gains on any hardware.

AFAICT hdparm says "suspicious results" when the disk speed is greater
than one-half the buffer speed.  I just got 51.20 and 26.34 on the PPro
with my patches and the message came out again.

--
 Chuck
 I am not a number!