On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 10:47 PM, Kris Buelens<[email protected]> wrote:
> The simple MW approach is surely wrong, it will not create a PAV
> environment: Linux will think it has 3 different devices, accidents will
> happen.

You're wrong. A very simple experiment could have shown you that:

lxrob1:~ # head -n 1 /sys/bus/ccw/devices/0.0.04*2/uid
==> /sys/bus/ccw/devices/0.0.0402/uid <==
IBM.68000000033025.0120.28.000008bb00000bda0000000000000000
==> /sys/bus/ccw/devices/0.0.0412/uid <==
IBM.68000000033025.0120.28.000008bb00000bda0000000000000000
lxrob1:~ # vmcp q md 402 loc
TargetID Tdev OwnerID  Odev Dtype Vol-ID Rdev   StartLoc       Size
ROBLX1   0402 ROBLX1   0402 3390  VM4V05 0148       2235        800
lxrob1:~ # vmcp q md 412 loc
TargetID Tdev OwnerID  Odev Dtype Vol-ID Rdev   StartLoc       Size
ROBLX1   0412 ROBLX1   0402 3390  VM4V05 0148       2235        800

Note: The casual observer may spot the beginning and end of the extent
in the VM appendix to the device identification.

> MDC will avoid the IO; Control Unit cache hit is still IO as concerned for
> the z Series, but here PAV would help.  AFAIK, PAV will not help if the
> concurrent IOs are not satisfied mostly from the control unit cache: the
> real disk can only handle one IO anyhow.

Not entirely. The current DASD subsystems under the covers also do
various magic that may enable the back-end to spread a logical ECKD
volume over multiple physical drives and thus have more than one I/O
active at the same time on a single logical volume.

It is fairly easy to demonstrate whether it works. One reason I did
not (yet) react on Bob's questions is that it is rather complicated to
determine which workload would benefit from it, if any. I stopped
working on the draft response twice because it got way too long to
post ;-)

In general, I don't put energy in letting a single virtual machine
monopolize any subsystem. On z/VM you normally have sufficient others
that share the resources. Performance measurements that try to drive a
single virtual machine as fast as possible have little value in my
world.

Rob
-- 
Rob van der Heij
Velocity Software
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/

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