Re: Strange IDE performance change in 2.6.1-rc1 (again)

[Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>]

Paolo Ornati <ornati@lycos.it> wrote:
>
> I haven't done a lot of tests but it seems to me that the changes in 
> mm/filemap.c are the only things that influence the sequential read 
> performance on my disk.

The fact that this only happens when reading a blockdev (true?) is a big
hint.   Maybe it is because regular files implement ->readpages.

If the below patch makes read throughput worse on regular files too then
that would confirm the idea.

diff -puN mm/readahead.c~a mm/readahead.c
--- 25/mm/readahead.c~a	Wed Jan  7 15:56:32 2004
+++ 25-akpm/mm/readahead.c	Wed Jan  7 15:56:36 2004
@@ -103,11 +103,6 @@ static int read_pages(struct address_spa
 	struct pagevec lru_pvec;
 	int ret = 0;
 
-	if (mapping->a_ops->readpages) {
-		ret = mapping->a_ops->readpages(filp, mapping, pages, nr_pages);
-		goto out;
-	}
-
 	pagevec_init(&lru_pvec, 0);
 	for (page_idx = 0; page_idx < nr_pages; page_idx++) {
 		struct page *page = list_to_page(pages);

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