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-rw-r--r--Documentation/block/biodoc.txt6
-rw-r--r--Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt45
-rw-r--r--Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt10
3 files changed, 53 insertions, 8 deletions
diff --git a/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt b/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt
index 6fab97ea7e6b..b9a83dd24732 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/biodoc.txt
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ Notes Written on Jan 15, 2002:
Last Updated May 2, 2002
September 2003: Updated I/O Scheduler portions
- Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>
+ Nick Piggin <npiggin@kernel.dk>
Introduction:
@@ -1162,8 +1162,8 @@ where a driver received a request ala this before:
As mentioned, there is no virtual mapping of a bio. For DMA, this is
not a problem as the driver probably never will need a virtual mapping.
-Instead it needs a bus mapping (pci_map_page for a single segment or
-use blk_rq_map_sg for scatter gather) to be able to ship it to the driver. For
+Instead it needs a bus mapping (dma_map_page for a single segment or
+use dma_map_sg for scatter gather) to be able to ship it to the driver. For
PIO drivers (or drivers that need to revert to PIO transfer once in a
while (IDE for example)), where the CPU is doing the actual data
transfer a virtual mapping is needed. If the driver supports highmem I/O,
diff --git a/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt b/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..e578feed6d81
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/block/cfq-iosched.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+CFQ ioscheduler tunables
+========================
+
+slice_idle
+----------
+This specifies how long CFQ should idle for next request on certain cfq queues
+(for sequential workloads) and service trees (for random workloads) before
+queue is expired and CFQ selects next queue to dispatch from.
+
+By default slice_idle is a non-zero value. That means by default we idle on
+queues/service trees. This can be very helpful on highly seeky media like
+single spindle SATA/SAS disks where we can cut down on overall number of
+seeks and see improved throughput.
+
+Setting slice_idle to 0 will remove all the idling on queues/service tree
+level and one should see an overall improved throughput on faster storage
+devices like multiple SATA/SAS disks in hardware RAID configuration. The down
+side is that isolation provided from WRITES also goes down and notion of
+IO priority becomes weaker.
+
+So depending on storage and workload, it might be useful to set slice_idle=0.
+In general I think for SATA/SAS disks and software RAID of SATA/SAS disks
+keeping slice_idle enabled should be useful. For any configurations where
+there are multiple spindles behind single LUN (Host based hardware RAID
+controller or for storage arrays), setting slice_idle=0 might end up in better
+throughput and acceptable latencies.
+
+CFQ IOPS Mode for group scheduling
+===================================
+Basic CFQ design is to provide priority based time slices. Higher priority
+process gets bigger time slice and lower priority process gets smaller time
+slice. Measuring time becomes harder if storage is fast and supports NCQ and
+it would be better to dispatch multiple requests from multiple cfq queues in
+request queue at a time. In such scenario, it is not possible to measure time
+consumed by single queue accurately.
+
+What is possible though is to measure number of requests dispatched from a
+single queue and also allow dispatch from multiple cfq queue at the same time.
+This effectively becomes the fairness in terms of IOPS (IO operations per
+second).
+
+If one sets slice_idle=0 and if storage supports NCQ, CFQ internally switches
+to IOPS mode and starts providing fairness in terms of number of requests
+dispatched. Note that this mode switching takes effect only for group
+scheduling. For non-cgroup users nothing should change.
diff --git a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
index e164403f60e1..f65274081c8d 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
@@ -25,11 +25,11 @@ size allowed by the hardware.
nomerges (RW)
-------------
-This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO merging
-requests in the block layer. Merging may still occur through a direct
-1-hit cache, since that comes for (almost) free. The IO scheduler will not
-waste cycles doing tree/hash lookups for merges if nomerges is 1. Defaults
-to 0, enabling all merges.
+This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO
+merging requests in the block layer. By default (0) all merges are
+enabled. When set to 1 only simple one-hit merges will be tried. When
+set to 2 no merge algorithms will be tried (including one-hit or more
+complex tree/hash lookups).
nr_requests (RW)
----------------