Re: [PATCH] io stalls

[Chris Mason <mason@suse.com>]

On Mon, 2003-06-09 at 19:51, Nick Piggin wrote:

> >
> >The latency results are better, with average time spent in
> >__get_request_wait being around 28 jiffies, and a max of 170 jiffies. 
> >The cost is throughput, further benchmarking needs to be done but, but I
> >wanted to get this out for review and testing.  It should at least help
> >us decide if the request allocation code really is causing our problems.
> >
> 
> Well the latency numbers are good - is this with dbench 90?
> 

Yes, that number was dbench 90, but dbench 50,90, and 120 gave about the
same stats with the final patch.

> snip

> >+
> >+static inline int queue_full(request_queue_t *q, int rw)
> >+{
> >+	rmb();
> >+	if (rw == READ)
> >+		return q->read_full;
> >+	else
> >+		return q->write_full;
> >+}
> >+
> >
> 
> I don't think you need the barriers here, do you?
> 

I put the barriers in early on when almost all the calls were done
outside spin locks, the current flavor of the patch only does one
clear_queue_full without the io_request_lock held.  It should be enough
to toss a barrier in just that one spot.  But I wanted to leave them in
so I could move things around until the final version (if there ever is
one ;-)

-chris