Re: Serial Console and Slow SCSI Disk Access?

From: Jeff Gold
Date: Mon Jun 19 2006 - 11:12:58 EST


Helge Hafting wrote:
With nothing attached, any write to the serial device might go
through a lengthy timeout because of flow control. [...] But I can't
see why it'd make scsi disks slower. The scsi host adapter initialization writes some messages of course, but there should be no
more console accesses during a hdparm test run.

This makes sense to me. When I attach a serial cable and use that to login (I've got agetty running), hdparm produces no console messages that I can see using minicom. Still, the disk throughput is around 1.5 MB/sec for some reason. When I disable the serial console in grub.conf and reboot I get over 70 MB/sec again.

A combination of out-of-tree patches (mainly network related but also one to disable PM_TIMERS) seem to eliminate the issue even with the serial console enabled, at least for the moment. That means I no longer have a problem, but the whole thing is mysterious to me.

Jeff
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