Re: [PATCH] sata_sil: Greatly improve DMA support

From: Indan Zupancic
Date: Sat May 19 2007 - 19:22:29 EST


On Sun, May 20, 2007 00:03, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> Indan Zupancic wrote:
>> This patch seems to work with my SiI 3512, though I don't notice any
>> difference, neither a speedup, nor a slowdown. Hdparm gives the same
>> speeds (-tT), and cp -a'ing kernel sources is abysmal slow in both cases,
>> (need to look into that one) so I didn't really test it that well.
>
>
> It won't result in much of a speedup, except in situations where IOMMU
> or other situation that causes you to run into the 64k boundary being an
> issue -- generally only on huge transfers.
>
> A good measure is to dd(1) to/from the block device, rather than using a
> filesystem. As has been shown on LKML, the filesystem can really slow
> things down in some cases.

I didn't really expect a speedup, it's more that I've no regression to report.

I could benchmark the patch more thoroughly, but right now I'm more worried
about the crawling cp I just discovered. Talking about filesystems slowing down
things...

Test:

$ cp -a linux-2.6/ /tmp/

done on the same ext3 partition. linux-2.6 contains source and git repo only,
I'm compiling stuff with O=../obj.

$ vmstat 10
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa
0 1 0 4168 3316 195700 0 0 739 494 530 393 15 3 66 16
0 3 4 4120 2040 198196 0 0 14677 14111 1247 435 0 17 0 83
0 1 4 3588 1444 199696 0 0 8892 9472 1362 438 0 12 0 88
1 0 4 3772 4228 196012 0 0 764 454 1161 345 0 4 0 96
0 1 4 3548 6156 193088 0 0 793 851 1158 340 0 4 0 96
0 1 4 3852 7608 189096 0 0 798 523 1160 474 1 4 0 95
1 1 4 3612 8684 186048 0 0 1244 864 1178 430 2 5 0 93
0 1 4 90660 9308 96396 0 0 853 906 1244 578 7 6 0 87
0 1 4 72280 9816 112368 0 0 830 854 1278 429 12 5 0 83
1 0 4 52488 10296 130560 0 0 935 861 1178 418 1 6 0 94
0 1 4 30500 10788 149776 0 0 977 858 1178 371 0 6 0 94
0 1 4 9792 11244 167856 0 0 918 1394 1182 350 1 5 0 94
0 1 4 4016 11216 172504 0 0 1017 858 1181 382 1 6 0 94
0 1 4 3660 11484 171484 0 0 966 861 1182 410 1 6 0 94

It never finished, as I had no patience to copy about 900 Mb with this rate.

As it's a git tree, I suppose it's heavily fragmented, but this is still rather
pathetic. Should I blame cp, or is something else wrong? Any ideas how
to figure this one out would be appreciated. Sorry for the off-topicness.

Greetings,

Indan


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