From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Yuehai Xu Subject: Questions about RAID and I/O scheduler Date: Wed, 31 Mar 2010 16:24:09 -0400 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Return-path: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, yhxu@wayne.edu, czoccolo@gmail.com, neilb@suse.de, jens.axboe@oracle.com List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hi, I noticed that some one said NOOP is usually the default I/O scheduler for hardware RAID. Why not CFQ? Suppose there are just several sequential read processes, as I know CFQ will keep all the disk heads of hard raid to serve a process for a while(a time slice), in that case, CFQ should be the best of all I/O schedulers. Am I right? Generally, hard raid should have its own I/O scheduler in their firmware, in that case, the I/O scheduler of OS should do nothing except dispatch the requests as soon as possible, it is the hard raid itself to decide how to schedule these requests. From this point of view, NOOP should be the default one. I am really confused here. The next question is about the maximal number of disks in disk array, the fault tolerance should be one limitation because the more the number of disks, the higher chance of failure. However, may throughput also be one limitation? Do you know anyone use disk array which contains large number of disks to handle small requests? Such as 256 disks to handle 4K requests? Thanks! Yuehai