Re: Silicon Image 3112A SATA trouble

Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz
2003-11-30T16:20:29Z

I read it _very_ closely, here is your original mail with subject
"Re: 2.6.0-test9 /-mm3 SATA siimage - bad disk performance":

On Saturday 15 of November 2003 10:11, Prakash K. Cheemplavam wrote:
> Marcus Hartig wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > with the Fedora 1 kernel 2.4.22-1.2115.nptl I get with hdparm -t
> > (Timing buffered disk reads) 34 MB/sec. Its very slow for this drive.
> >
> > With 2.6.0-test9 and -mm3 I get around "62 MB in 3.05 = 20,31". Wow"
> > Back to ~1998?
>
> I have a similar problem: With 2.4.22-ac3 I had 37mb/sec with my Samsung
> HD and 49MB/sec with IBM/Hitachi, now with 2.6 (all I tried, including
^^^^^^^^^^^^
> test9-mm2) I had only 20mb/sec for Samsung and about 39mb/sec for the
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> IBM. Motherboard is Abit NF7-S Rev2.0, as well, so same situation with
^^^^
> the siimage 1.06 driver. I wanted to run some dd tests as well, but it
> is a real performance hit. Playing with readahead or other hdparm
> options didn't help either.
>
> Prakash

In 2.6.x there is no max_kb_per_request setting in /proc/ide/hdx/settings.
Therefore
echo "max_kb_per_request:128" > /proc/ide/hde/settings
does not work.

Hmm. actually I was under influence that we have generic ioctls in 2.6.x,
but I can find only BLKSECTGET, BLKSECTSET was somehow lost. Jens?

Prakash, please try patch and maybe you will have 2 working drivers now :-).

--bart

On Sunday 30 of November 2003 16:52, Prakash K. Cheemplavam wrote:
> Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > Okay, stop bashing IDE driver... three mails is enough...
> >
> > Apply this patch and you should get similar performance from IDE driver.
> > You are probably seeing big improvements with libata driver because
>
> you are
>
> > using Samsung and IBM/Hitachi drives only, for Seagate it probably
>
> sucks just
>
> > like IDE driver...
> >
> > IDE driver limits requests to 15kB for all SATA drives...
> > libata driver limits requests to 15kB only for Seagata SATA drives...
>
> If you read my message closely then you should have understand that
> setting the request highr *didn't* help, ie
>
> echo "max_kb_per_request:128" > /proc/ide/hde/settings
>
> made *no* difference, so I won't even try that patch. As far I have
> understood this is exactly the thing you changed in the patch. If I am
> mistaken, then I take it back.
>
> Prakash