[PATCH] virtio_blk: revert QUEUE_FLAG_VIRT addition

Rusty Russell
Mon, 28 Sep 2009 03:36:59 -0000

From: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>

It seems like the addition of QUEUE_FLAG_VIRT caueses major performance
regressions for Fedora users:

	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=509383
	https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=505695

while I can't reproduce those extreme regressions myself I think the flag
is wrong.

Rationale:

  QUEUE_FLAG_VIRT expands to QUEUE_FLAG_NONROT which casus the queue
  unplugged immediately.  This is not a good behaviour for at least
  qemu and kvm where we do have significant overhead for every
  I/O operations.  Even with all the latested speeups (native AIO,
  MSI support, zero copy) we can only get native speed for up to 128kb
  I/O requests we already are down to 66% of native performance for 4kb
  requests even on my laptop running the Intel X25-M SSD for which the
  QUEUE_FLAG_NONROT was designed.
  If we ever get virtio-blk overhead low enough that this flag makes
  sense it should only be set based on a feature flag set by the host.

Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch at lst.de>
Signed-off-by: Rusty Russell <rusty at rustcorp.com.au>
---
 drivers/block/virtio_blk.c |    1 -
 1 file changed, 1 deletion(-)

Index: linux-2.6/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c
==================================================================---
linux-2.6.orig/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c	2009-09-04 17:33:48.802523987 -0300
+++ linux-2.6/drivers/block/virtio_blk.c	2009-09-04 17:33:56.186522158 -0300
@@ -314,7 +314,6 @@ static int __devinit virtblk_probe(struc
 	}

 	vblk->disk->queue->queuedata = vblk;
-	queue_flag_set_unlocked(QUEUE_FLAG_VIRT, vblk->disk->queue);

 	if (index < 26) {
 		sprintf(vblk->disk->disk_name, "vd%c", 'a' + index %
26);