block: Added in stricter no merge semantics for block I/O

Updated 'nomerges' tunable to accept a value of '2' - indicating that _no_
merges at all are to be attempted (not even the simple one-hit cache).

The following table illustrates the additional benefit - 5 minute runs of
a random I/O load were applied to a dozen devices on a 16-way x86_64 system.

nomerges        Throughput      %System         Improvement (tput / %sys)
--------        ------------    -----------     -------------------------
0               12.45 MB/sec    0.669365609
1               12.50 MB/sec    0.641519199     0.40% / 2.71%
2               12.52 MB/sec    0.639849750     0.56% / 2.96%

Signed-off-by: Alan D. Brunelle <alan.brunelle@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>

1 files changed, 14 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block b/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block
index d2f90334bb93..4873c759d535 100644
--- a/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block
+++ b/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-block
@@ -128,3 +128,17 @@ Description:
 		preferred request size for workloads where sustained
 		throughput is desired.  If no optimal I/O size is
 		reported this file contains 0.
+
+What:		/sys/block/<disk>/queue/nomerges
+Date:		January 2010
+Contact:
+Description:
+		Standard I/O elevator operations include attempts to
+		merge contiguous I/Os. For known random I/O loads these
+		attempts will always fail and result in extra cycles
+		being spent in the kernel. This allows one to turn off
+		this behavior on one of two ways: When set to 1, complex
+		merge checks are disabled, but the simple one-shot merges
+		with the previous I/O request are enabled. When set to 2,
+		all merge tries are disabled. The default value is 0 -
+		which enables all types of merge tries.