Jeff Garzik wrote:
[...]
With this simple patch, the max request size goes from 128K to 32MB... so you can imagine this will definitely help performance. Throughput goes up. Interrupts go down. Fun for the whole family.
[...]
I have experienced a noticeable improvement concerning the CPU usage
and disk throughput with this patch.
Benchmark specs:
o read from only 1 disk (sda), or from 2 disks (sda+sdb), with
1 or 2 instances of "dd if=/dev/sd? of=/dev/null bs=100M".
o hardware: two Seagate 160GB SATA, on a Silicon Image 3114, on a
32-bit/33MHz PCI bus, 1GB RAM.
o software: kernel 2.6.5-rc2-bk6-libata2.
As other people were complaining that the 32MB max request size might be too
high, I did give a try to 1MB (by replacing "65534" by "2046" in the patch).
There is no visible differences between 32MB and 1MB.
PS: Jeff: "pci_dma_mapping_error()", in libata-core.c from your latest
2.6-libata patch, is an unresolved symbol. I have had to comment it out
to be able to compile the kernel.