direct-io regression [Was: How to track down abysmal performance ata - raid1 - crypto - vg/lv - xfs]

[Dominik Brodowski <linux@dominikbrodowski.net>]

Hey,

when attempting to track down insufficient I/O performance, I found the
following reression relating to direct-io on my notebook, where an
ata device, which consists of several partitions, is combined to a lvm
volume, and one logical volume is then encrypted using dm-crypt. Test case
was the following command:

$ dd if=/dev/mapper/vg0-root_crypt of=/dev/zero iflag=direct bs=8k count=131072

2.6.34 results in ~16 MB/s,
2.6.35 results in ~ 3.1 MB/s

The regression was bisected down to the follwoing commit:

commit c2c6ca417e2db7a519e6e92c82f4a933d940d076
Author: Josef Bacik <josef@redhat.com>
Date:   Sun May 23 11:00:55 2010 -0400

    direct-io: do not merge logically non-contiguous requests
    
...

How to fix this? I do not use btrfs, but ext3 (and the access was down on
the block level, not on the fs level, so this btrs-related commit should not
cause such a regression).

Best,

	Dominik