Initial testing has shown the the right IO scheduler to use under Linux
is noop. This strikes the ideal balance by allowing the zfs elevator
to do all request ordering and prioritization. While allowing the
Linux elevator to do the maximum front/back merging allowed by the
physical device. This yields the largest possible requests for the
device with the lowest total overhead.
While 'noop' should be right for your system you can choose a different
IO scheduler with the 'zfs_vdev_scheduler' option. You may set this
value to any of the standard Linux schedulers: noop, cfq, deadline,
anticipatory. In addition, if you choose 'none' zfs will not attempt
to change the IO scheduler for the block device.
The name of the flag used to mark a bio as synchronous has changed
again in the 2.6.36 kernel due to the unification of the BIO_RW_*
and REQ_* flags. The new flag is called REQ_SYNC. To simplify
checking this flag I have introduced the vdev_disk_dio_is_sync()
helper function. Based on the results of several new autoconf
tests it uses the correct mask to check for a synchronous bio.
Preferred interface for flagging a synchronous bio:
2.6.12-2.6.29: BIO_RW_SYNC
2.6.30-2.6.35: BIO_RW_SYNCIO
2.6.36-2.6.xx: REQ_SYNC
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
Brian Behlendorf