I suggest two things:
First, draw a line (this would be a somewhat arbitrary number).  If
the disk is less than (for example) 256M (roughly 350 cyls of 3390),
then continue to use mmap/memcpy.  If larger, then switch to
pread/pwrite.  Second, provide a mount option so that the user can
always specify which model to they want.  (With the option to be
explicit, there is little reason any of us can complain about where
you draw that line.)

-- R;   <><
Rick Troth
Velocity Software
http://www.velocitysoftware.com/





On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 07:20, Jan Glauber <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-12-02 at 14:05 -0600, David Boyes wrote:
>> > It's just mmap'ing the whole disk into the process's address space for the
>> > programmers sake.
>>
>> BAD idea (in the sense of 'broken as designed'). You're taxing the virtual 
>> memory system in a shared-resource environment, which hurts the entire 
>> environment for a little convenience in programming.
>>
>> > If that turns out to be a problem we could theoretically go back to
>> > pread/pwrite. But I'm not sure how many users have such large CMS disks?
>>
>> Please do. Doesn't matter if it's an edge case, it shouldn't do this.
>
> Since there seems to be collective disapproval of the requirement to
> touch the memory settings for large disks I'm looking into changing
> that...
>
> I can easily replace the mmap-memcpy with pread/pwrite. Unfortunately I
> see huge performance drops if I do so. Currently I'm looking why the
> system call variant costs so much more than mmap.
>
> Jan
>
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
>> send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or 
>> visit
>> http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>> For more information on Linux on System z, visit
>> http://wiki.linuxvm.org/
>>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
> send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
> http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> For more information on Linux on System z, visit
> http://wiki.linuxvm.org/

----------------------------------------------------------------------
For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit
http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For more information on Linux on System z, visit
http://wiki.linuxvm.org/

Reply via email to