Re: PATCH 3/6 - direct-io: do not merge logically non-contiguousrequests

From: Christian Ehrhardt
Date: Sat Aug 07 2010 - 03:31:39 EST




On 08/06/2010 02:03 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
Something is deeply wrong here. Raw block device access has a 1:1
mapping between logical and physical block numbers. They really should
never be non-contiguous.

At least I did nothing I know about to break it :-)

As I mentioned just iozone using direct I/O (-I flag of iozone then using O_DIRECT for the file) on a ext2 file-system.
The file system was coming clean out of mkfs the file was written with iozone one step before the traced read run.

The only uncommon thing here might be the block device, which is a scsi disk on our SAN servers (I'm running on s390) - so the driver in charge is zfcp (drivers/s390/scsi/).
I could use dasd (drivers/s390/block) disks as well, but I have no blktrace of them yet - what I already know is that they show a similar cost increase. On monday I should be able to get machine resources to verify that both disk types are affected.

Let me know if I can do anything else on my system to shed some light on the matter.



--

Grüsse / regards, Christian Ehrhardt
IBM Linux Technology Center, System z Linux Performance
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