From f1afb36a6102b52949c2c6d8eb250eddcce3fc5f Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Mike Snitzer Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 10:02:01 -0400 Subject: dm cache policy mq: simplify ability to promote sequential IO to the cache Before, if the user wanted sequential IO to be promoted to the cache they'd have to set sequential_threshold to some nebulous large value. Now, the user may easily disable sequential IO detection (and sequential IO's implicit bypass of the cache) by setting sequential_threshold to 0. Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer --- Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt | 16 +++++++++++----- 1 file changed, 11 insertions(+), 5 deletions(-) (limited to 'Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt') diff --git a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt index 7746e5dbfd40..0d124a971801 100644 --- a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt +++ b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt @@ -47,16 +47,22 @@ Message and constructor argument pairs are: 'discard_promote_adjustment ' The sequential threshold indicates the number of contiguous I/Os -required before a stream is treated as sequential. The random threshold +required before a stream is treated as sequential. Once a stream is +considered sequential it will bypass the cache. The random threshold is the number of intervening non-contiguous I/Os that must be seen before the stream is treated as random again. The sequential and random thresholds default to 512 and 4 respectively. -Large, sequential ios are probably better left on the origin device -since spindles tend to have good bandwidth. The io_tracker counts -contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the io is in one of these sequential -modes. +Large, sequential I/Os are probably better left on the origin device +since spindles tend to have good sequential I/O bandwidth. The +io_tracker counts contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the I/O is in one +of these sequential modes. But there are use-cases for wanting to +promote sequential blocks to the cache (e.g. fast application startup). +If sequential threshold is set to 0 the sequential I/O detection is +disabled and sequential I/O will no longer implicitly bypass the cache. +Setting the random threshold to 0 does _not_ disable the random I/O +stream detection. Internally the mq policy determines a promotion threshold. If the hit count of a block not in the cache goes above this threshold it gets -- cgit v1.2.3