Re: [PATCH 00/33] SG table chaining support

[Jens Axboe]

On Mon, Jul 16 2007, Kai Makisara wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
> 
> > >>>>> "John" == John Stoffel <john@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> > 
> > John> Will this help out tape drive performance at all?  I looked
> > John> through the patches quickly, esp the AIC7xxx stuff since that's
> > John> what I use, but nothing jumped out at me...
> > 
> > Yes.  Most modern tape drives want a block size of 1MB or higher.
> > With the old stack we'd be stuck at 512KB because the sg limitations
> > caused us to come just short of 1MB...
> > 
> Tape block sizes up to 16 MB have been possible for a very long time but 
> this has required tuning of the block/scsi parameters. Very few people 
> seem to have done this and the common (mis)belief seems to be that the 
> tape block size limit has been 512 kB. It is good if this tuning is not
> needed in future.

The main difference is now you get to do it without hacks and in a clean
way, so it works through the normal IO path and not some on-the-side
thing (or st only).

-- 
Jens Axboe

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/