SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Martin A. Fink]

Dear all,

I found out, that writing to a SATA harddisk costs around 20% of the
computers cpu time. I write blocks of 1MB size to a file. Write performance
is around 51MB/s what I think is really good. My computer has an Intel ICH6
chipset and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor.
If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that
writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.

Can I do anything to optimize writing from memory to disk?

My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
>From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on
this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.

So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
SATA driver of my operating system?

time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
results in

real 0m52.561s
user 0m0.003s
sys  0m7.407s

and strace dd... gives among other information
6.84s 1004calls syscall: write

So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?


By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM

Thank you for answers,

Martin

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Alan]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:07:01 +0100
"Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:

> If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
> expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that
> writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.

It has some work to do - the amount in question depends upon the file
system and device drivers in use. For very high throughput read up on
the O_DIRECT feature.

> My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
> Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
> >From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on
> this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.

I doubt an ICH6 has the total memory bandwidth to achieve that to be
honest, but with PCI-E maybe you can.
 
> So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
> SATA driver of my operating system?

You don't give anything like enough information to even guess this. What
controller, what disks, what driver, what kernel version ?

> By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM

For vendor kernels, especially older ones it is probably best to ask the
vendor first.

Alan

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Martin A. Fink]

Am Freitag, 24. November 2006 14:33 schrieben Sie:
> On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:07:01 +0100
>
> "Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:
> > If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
> > expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out,
> > that writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.
>
> It has some work to do - the amount in question depends upon the file
> system and device drivers in use. For very high throughput read up on
> the O_DIRECT feature.

Well this seems to be independend from the file system. I tried to write 
directly to the raw device, but nevertheless the cpu time was 20% (sys time).

>
> > My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
> > Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
> >
> > >From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs
> > > on
> >
> > this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.
>
> I doubt an ICH6 has the total memory bandwidth to achieve that to be
> honest, but with PCI-E maybe you can.

This is an interessting point. The specification say that I can handle around 
120 to 150 MB/s each of the 4 S-ATA ports. With ICH6 the S-ATA ports seem to 
be directly connected to the Southbridge, and the Southbridge is directly 
connected to Northbridge via PCI Express. So it should be possible to get 150 
MB/s from north to south and from there in packages of 55 MB/s to the 
disks ?!

>
> > So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
> > SATA driver of my operating system?
>
> You don't give anything like enough information to even guess this. What
> controller, what disks, what driver, what kernel version ?

I use a Pentium 4 processor (Xeon), Intel ICH6 chipset, to write on a 250 GB 
S-ATA disk directly connected to one of the 4 onboard S-ATA connections.
kernel version is Linux version 2.6.8-24.25-smp. As disks I used ones from 
Winchester as well as Maxtor. Both behave the same.
Here is some information from /var/log/boot.msg

<6>ACPI: RSDP (v000 DELL                                      ) @ 0x000feb90
<6>ACPI: RSDT (v001 DELL    WS 360  0x00000007 ASL  0x00000061) @ 0x000fd165
<6>ACPI: FADT (v001 DELL    WS 360  0x00000007 ASL  0x00000061) @ 0x000fd19d
<6>ACPI: SSDT (v001   DELL    st_ex 0x00001000 MSFT 0x0100000d) @ 0xfffc8f10
<6>ACPI: MADT (v001 DELL    WS 360  0x00000007 ASL  0x00000061) @ 0x000fd211
<6>ACPI: BOOT (v001 DELL    WS 360  0x00000007 ASL  0x00000061) @ 0x000fd27d
<6>ACPI: ASF! (v016 DELL    WS 360  0x00000007 ASL  0x00000061) @ 0x000fd2a5
<6>ACPI: DSDT (v001   DELL    dt_ex 0x00001000 MSFT 0x0100000d) @ 0x00000000
<6>ACPI: PM-Timer IO Port: 0x808
<7>ACPI: Local APIC address 0xfee00000
<6>ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x01] lapic_id[0x00] enabled)
<4>Processor #0 15:2 APIC version 20
<6>ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x02] lapic_id[0x01] disabled)
<6>ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x03] lapic_id[0x01] disabled)
<6>ACPI: LAPIC (acpi_id[0x04] lapic_id[0x03] disabled)
<6>ACPI: IOAPIC (id[0x01] address[0xfec00000] gsi_base[0])
<4>IOAPIC[0]: apic_id 1, version 32, address 0xfec00000, GSI 0-23
<6>ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 0 global_irq 2 dfl dfl)
<6>ACPI: INT_SRC_OVR (bus 0 bus_irq 9 global_irq 9 high level)
<7>ACPI: IRQ0 used by override.
<7>ACPI: IRQ2 used by override.
<7>ACPI: IRQ9 used by override.
<4>Enabling APIC mode:  Flat.  Using 1 I/O APICs
<6>Using ACPI (MADT) for SMP configuration information

<6>CPU: L2 cache: 512K
<6>CPU: Hyper-Threading is disabled

<7>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0._PRT]
<7>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Routing Table [\_SB_.PCI0.PCI1._PRT]
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKA] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 *11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKB] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 *10 11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKC] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 *9 10 11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKD] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 *10 11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKE] (IRQs 3 4 5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15) *0, 
disabled.
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKF] (IRQs 3 4 *5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKG] (IRQs 3 4 *5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15)
<4>ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] (IRQs 3 4 *5 6 7 9 10 11 12 15)
<6>Linux Plug and Play Support v0.97 (c) Adam Belay
<6>PCI: Using ACPI for IRQ routing
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.1[B] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 177
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.2[C] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.3[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1d.7[D] -> GSI 23 (level, low) -> IRQ 193
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 185
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1f.3[B] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 201
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:00:1f.5[B] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 201
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:01:00.0[A] -> GSI 16 (level, low) -> IRQ 169
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:00.0[A] -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 209
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:01.0[A] -> GSI 22 (level, low) -> IRQ 217
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:02.0[A] -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 201
<6>ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:02:0c.0[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 185

<6>scsi1 : ata_piix
<5>  Vendor: ATA       Model: WDC WD740GD-75FL  Rev: 21.0
<5>  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
<5>SCSI device sda: 144531250 512-byte hdwr sectors (74000 MB)
<5>SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
<5>SCSI device sda: 144531250 512-byte hdwr sectors (74000 MB)
<5>SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
<6> sda: sda1 sda2 < sda5 sda6 sda7 sda8 >
<5>Attached scsi disk sda at scsi0, channel 0, id 0, lun 0

>
> > By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM
>
> For vendor kernels, especially older ones it is probably best to ask the
> vendor first.
>
> Alan

Here some measurement results:

time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
results in

real 0m52.561s
user 0m0.003s
sys  0m7.407s

and strace dd... gives among other information
6.84s 1004calls syscall: write

So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Alan]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 15:10:11 +0100
"Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:

> Well this seems to be independend from the file system. I tried to write 
> directly to the raw device, but nevertheless the cpu time was 20% (sys time).

sys time is not neccessarily CPU time.
 
> This is an interessting point. The specification say that I can handle around 
> 120 to 150 MB/s each of the 4 S-ATA ports. With ICH6 the S-ATA ports seem to 

At once ?

> be directly connected to the Southbridge, and the Southbridge is directly 
> connected to Northbridge via PCI Express. So it should be possible to get 150 
> MB/s from north to south and from there in packages of 55 MB/s to the 
> disks ?!

Ask the vendor.
 
> <6>scsi1 : ata_piix
> <5>  Vendor: ATA       Model: WDC WD740GD-75FL  Rev: 21.0
> <5>  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05

The PIIX interface needs CPU intervention each command, so in practice
about every 64K or so, and the CPU gets stalled waiting for the disk
during the setup of each I/O. The newer kernels support AHCI which does
not have this overhead, but it is only present on the newest intel
controllers.

> and strace dd... gives among other information
> 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
> 
> So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?

Waiting for the disk I would imagine.

Alan

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Martin A. Fink]

Am Freitag, 24. November 2006 15:30 schrieben Sie:
> On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 15:10:11 +0100
> "Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> > Well this seems to be independend from the file system. I tried to write 
> > directly to the raw device, but nevertheless the cpu time was 20% (sys 
time).
> 
> sys time is not neccessarily CPU time.
>  
> > This is an interessting point. The specification say that I can handle 
around 
> > 120 to 150 MB/s each of the 4 S-ATA ports. With ICH6 the S-ATA ports seem 
to 
> 
> At once ?
> 
> > be directly connected to the Southbridge, and the Southbridge is directly 
> > connected to Northbridge via PCI Express. So it should be possible to get 
150 
> > MB/s from north to south and from there in packages of 55 MB/s to the 
> > disks ?!
> 
> Ask the vendor.
>  
> > <6>scsi1 : ata_piix
> > <5>  Vendor: ATA       Model: WDC WD740GD-75FL  Rev: 21.0
> > <5>  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 05
> 
> The PIIX interface needs CPU intervention each command, so in practice
> about every 64K or so, and the CPU gets stalled waiting for the disk
> during the setup of each I/O. The newer kernels support AHCI which does
> not have this overhead, but it is only present on the newest intel
> controllers.

Can you tell me the name of this controllers? Is it ICH7 or 8 ?
What kernel versions?

Thank you very much
> 
> > and strace dd... gives among other information
> > 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
> > 
> > So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?
> 
> Waiting for the disk I would imagine.
> 
> Alan
> 
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
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-- 
Dipl. Physiker
Martin Anton Fink
Max Planck Institute for extraterrestrial Physics
Giessenbachstrasse
85741 Garching
Germany
Tel. +49-(0)89-30000-3645
Fax. +49-(0)89-30000-3569

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Andrew Morton]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 15:10:11 +0100
"Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:

> Here some measurement results:
> 
> time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
> results in
> 
> real 0m52.561s
> user 0m0.003s
> sys  0m7.407s
> 
> and strace dd... gives among other information
> 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
> 
> So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?

Profiling the kernel will tell.  Preferably with oprofile, but if for some
reason that doesn't work, with the old profiler.

I use this:

#!/bin/sh
sudo opcontrol --stop
sudo opcontrol --shutdown
sudo rm -rf /var/lib/oprofile
sudo opcontrol --vmlinux=/boot/vmlinux-$(uname -r)
sudo opcontrol --start-daemon
sudo opcontrol --start
time $@
sudo opcontrol --stop
sudo opcontrol --shutdown
sudo opreport -l /boot/vmlinux-$(uname -r) | head -50

I have seen PIO and MMIO operations on PCI busses take tremendous amounts
of time when that bus is saturated with DMA transfers.  But that was back
in the old days.

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Ed Sweetman]

Martin A. Fink wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I found out, that writing to a SATA harddisk costs around 20% of the
> computers cpu time. I write blocks of 1MB size to a file. Write performance
> is around 51MB/s what I think is really good. My computer has an Intel ICH6
> chipset and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor.
> If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
> expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that
> writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.
>
> Can I do anything to optimize writing from memory to disk?
>
> My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
> Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
> >From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on
> this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.
>
> So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
> SATA driver of my operating system?
>
> time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
> results in
>
> real 0m52.561s
> user 0m0.003s
> sys  0m7.407s
>
> and strace dd... gives among other information
> 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
>
> So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?
>   
forgetting the fact that you're only writing 0's and that makes me 
wonder if the filesystems are cheating because the data it's writing is 
all the same, you aren't syncing that data.  You're not benchmarking the 
actual write speed, you have buffer being used still with uncommitted data.

try using iozone or something a little more stressful on the system.  


If you rerun the "benchmark" and your scores are much better (like with 
your example the second run gets 260MB/sec for me) then it's not a good 
benchmark.   It should be consistantly the same no matter how many times 
you run it.


> By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM
>
> Thank you for answers,
>
> Martin
>   

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[J.A. Magallón]

On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:07:01 +0100, "Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
> 
> I found out, that writing to a SATA harddisk costs around 20% of the
> computers cpu time. I write blocks of 1MB size to a file. Write performance
> is around 51MB/s what I think is really good. My computer has an Intel ICH6
> chipset and a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor.
> If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
> expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that
> writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.
> 
> Can I do anything to optimize writing from memory to disk?
> 
> My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
> Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
> From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on
> this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.
> 

Theoretically for when CPUs and disks are capable of giving those speeds...

> So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
> SATA driver of my operating system?
> 
> time dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
> results in
> 
> real 0m52.561s
> user 0m0.003s
> sys  0m7.407s
> 

Guess first what are your busses limit. Get a try with hdparm.
I have this:

00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller (rev 02)
scsi 2:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      ST3200822AS      3.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5

/dev/sdc:
 Timing cached reads:   1432 MB in  2.00 seconds = 715.90 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  162 MB in  3.02 seconds =  53.70 MB/sec

That gives you the max speed limit of the kernel transfers+pci speed+disk cache speed
combo. Then you should add the real disk speed, but that's for a real benchmark
for iozone.

Also try to run several in parallel, one on each disk.

And something is really strange in your box:

werewolf:~> time -p dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 8.64253 seconds, 121 MB/s
real 8.64
user 0.00
sys 4.70

(dual xeon 2.4GHz)

CPU usage was 100% at the start but dropped to about 2-3-4%. 
Be sure to remove manually test.zero before running each test, if not
you will account the time the system spends cleaning the page cache when
dd unlinks or truncates test.zero:

werewolf:~> rm -f test.zero
werewolf:~> time -p dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 8.29974 seconds, 126 MB/s
real 8.30
user 0.00
sys 4.53
werewolf:~> time -p dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 8.30443 seconds, 126 MB/s
real 31.86
user 0.00
sys 5.52
werewolf:~> rm -f test.zero; time -p dd if=/dev/zero of=test.zero bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 7.98103 seconds, 131 MB/s
real 8.07
user 0.00
sys 4.61


> and strace dd... gives among other information
> 6.84s 1004calls syscall: write
> 
> So I spend 45s of 52s within the kernel. Why so long?
> 

--
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>     \               Software is like sex:
                                         \         It's better when it's free
Mandriva Linux release 2007.1 (Cooker) for i586
Linux 2.6.18-jam13 (gcc 4.1.2 20061110 (prerelease) (4.1.2-0.20061110.1mdv2007.1)) #1 SMP PREEMPT

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Daniel J Blueman]

I'm having the same issue - I have an ICH6M w/ SATAII-300 disk
(running in SATA I-150 mode), running in native AHCI mode. Processor
is Pentium-M 1.7GHz 2MB L2$, DDR2-667.

The kernel is stock-compiled 2.6.19-rc6 on current Debian stable (gcc
4.1.2) - and I saw this on previous kernels also. When read()ing 16KB
or 1MB chunks from the disk, I'm getting 65MB/s (expected) [1], but at
a surprising ~12% system time [2].

Oprofile [3] shows nothing unexpected. Kernel messages [4] look like
it's configured correctly too. Spinlocks or what?

--- [1]

# dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1024k
<Ctrl-C>
3532+0 records in
3531+0 records out
3702521856 bytes (3.7 GB) copied, 56.5266 seconds, 65.5 MB/s

--- [2]

# vmstat 2
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- ----cpu----
 r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in   cs us sy id wa
[snip]
 0  1      0   9532 537632  79812    0    0     0     0 1348 1217  0 11  0 89
 0  1      0   9944 576888  41724    0    0     0     0 1343 1195  0 12  0 89

--- [3]

# opreport -lt1
CPU: PIII, speed 1700 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (clocks processor is not halted) with
a unit mask of 0x00 (No unit mask) count 100000
warning: /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive is not in a usable binary format.
samples  %        app name                 symbol name
19710    38.9965  vmlinux                  __copy_to_user_ll
13573    26.8544  vmlinux                  default_idle
982       1.9429  vmlinux                  isolate_lru_pages
661       1.3078  vmlinux                  kmem_cache_free
521       1.0308  vmlinux                  kmem_cache_alloc

--- [4]

$ dmesg | less
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
ICH6: IDE controller at PCI slot 0000:00:1f.1
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.1[A] -> GSI 18 (level, low) -> IRQ 18
ICH6: chipset revision 4
ICH6: not 100% native mode: will probe irqs later
    ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf800-0xf807, BIOS settings: hda:DMA, hdb:pio
Probing IDE interface ide0...
hda: TRANSCEND, CFA DISK drive
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
Probing IDE interface ide1...
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 8124480 sectors (4159 MB) w/1KiB Cache, CHS=8060/16/63, DMA
 hda: hda1 hda2
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: version 2.0
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:00:1f.2[B] -> GSI 19 (level, low) -> IRQ 19
PCI: Setting latency timer of device 0000:00:1f.2 to 64
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: AHCI 0001.0000 32 slots 4 ports 1.5 Gbps 0x5 impl IDE mode
ahci 0000:00:1f.2: flags: 64bit ncq pm led slum part
ata1: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF080E100 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 19
ata2: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF080E180 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 19
ata3: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF080E200 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 19
ata4: SATA max UDMA/133 cmd 0xF080E280 ctl 0x0 bmdma 0x0 irq 19
scsi0 : ahci
ata1: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
ata1.00: ATA-7, max UDMA/133, 488397168 sectors: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
ata1.00: ata1: dev 0 multi count 16
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
scsi1 : ahci
ata2: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
scsi2 : ahci
ata3: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 300)
scsi3 : ahci
ata4: SATA link down (SStatus 0 SControl 0)
scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access     ATA      HDT722525DLA380  V44O PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
SCSI device sda: 488397168 512-byte hdwr sectors (250059 MB)
sda: Write Protect is off
sda: Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
SCSI device sda: drive cache: write back
 sda: sda1 sda2
sd 0:0:0:0: Attached scsi disk sda

Alan wrote:
> On Fri, 24 Nov 2006 14:07:01 +0100
> "Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:
>
> > If I understand the design of this chipset correctly, then I would have
> > expected, that the CPU needs to do only few work, instead I found out, that
> > writing to disk seems to be really hard work for the CPU.
>
> It has some work to do - the amount in question depends upon the file
> system and device drivers in use. For very high throughput read up on
> the O_DIRECT feature.
>
> > My final aim is to get around 140MB/s of data from 3 different Gigabit
> > Ethernet cards and store it on 3 harddisk drives that perform 50MB/s.
> > >From the SATA bus side there should be no problem. Each of the 4 SATAs on
> > this ICH6 chipset are capable of 150MB/s.
>
> I doubt an ICH6 has the total memory bandwidth to achieve that to be
> honest, but with PCI-E maybe you can.
>
> > So what makes my CPU that slow? Is it a hardware problem or a problem of
> > SATA driver of my operating system?
>
> You don't give anything like enough information to even guess this. What
> controller, what disks, what driver, what kernel version ?
>
> > By the way: I'm working with SuSE Linux 9.2 on a Dell Desktop PC, 1GB RAM
>
> For vendor kernels, especially older ones it is probably best to ask the
> vendor first.
>
> Alan
-- 
Daniel J Blueman

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Martin A. Fink]

Dear Alan,

You wrote
> The PIIX interface needs CPU intervention each command, so in practice
> about every 64K or so, and the CPU gets stalled waiting for the disk
> during the setup of each I/O. The newer kernels support AHCI which does
> not have this overhead, but it is only present on the newest intel
> controllers.

Can you tell me the name of these newest controllers? Is it ICH7 or 8 ?
What kernel versions? dmesg only shows ACPI and u/e/o hci_* host controller.
(kernel version is 2.6.8-24.25-smp). How can I switch to AHCI ?

Thank you very much,

Martin

Re: SATA Performance with Intel ICH6

[Alan]

On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 11:09:47 +0100
"Martin A. Fink" <fink@mpe.mpg.de> wrote:

> Dear Alan,
> 
> You wrote
> > The PIIX interface needs CPU intervention each command, so in practice
> > about every 64K or so, and the CPU gets stalled waiting for the disk
> > during the setup of each I/O. The newer kernels support AHCI which does
> > not have this overhead, but it is only present on the newest intel
> > controllers.
> 
> Can you tell me the name of these newest controllers? Is it ICH7 or 8 ?
> What kernel versions? dmesg only shows ACPI and u/e/o hci_* host controller.
> (kernel version is 2.6.8-24.25-smp). How can I switch to AHCI ?

According to the docs

	ICH6
	ICH6M
	ICH7
	ICH7M
	ICH7R
	ESB2
	ICH7-M DH
	ICH8
	ICH8M

These devices support both "legacy" and "ahci" modes of operation,
usually controlled by a BIOS setting.