libata/ahci: accommodate tag ordered controllers
authorDan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Thu, 17 Apr 2014 18:48:21 +0000 (11:48 -0700)
committerGreg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
Tue, 13 May 2014 11:32:51 +0000 (13:32 +0200)
commit5c295064496bf06df2475f1046e47a5fedf7c3ea
tree27eef5a49f99d58724d9cc20355add77a31e22de
parent225d1fcc34f195b01346ea1cf2f3f1a9836ff876
libata/ahci: accommodate tag ordered controllers

commit 8a4aeec8d2d6a3edeffbdfae451cdf05cbf0fefd upstream.

The AHCI spec allows implementations to issue commands in tag order
rather than FIFO order:

5.3.2.12 P:SelectCmd
HBA sets pSlotLoc = (pSlotLoc + 1) mod (CAP.NCS + 1)
or HBA selects the command to issue that has had the
PxCI bit set to '1' longer than any other command
pending to be issued.

The result is that commands posted sequentially (time-wise) may play out
of sequence when issued by hardware.

This behavior has likely been hidden by drives that arrange for commands
to complete in issue order.  However, it appears recent drives (two from
different vendors that we have found so far) inflict out-of-order
completions as a matter of course.  So, we need to take care to maintain
ordered submission, otherwise we risk triggering a drive to fall out of
sequential-io automation and back to random-io processing, which incurs
large latency and degrades throughput.

This issue was found in simple benchmarks where QD=2 seq-write
performance was 30-50% *greater* than QD=32 seq-write performance.

Tagging for -stable and making the change globally since it has a low
risk-to-reward ratio.  Also, word is that recent versions of an unnamed
OS also does it this way now.  So, drives in the field are already
experienced with this tag ordering scheme.

Cc: Dave Jiang <dave.jiang@intel.com>
Cc: Ed Ciechanowski <ed.ciechanowski@intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Matthew Wilcox <matthew.r.wilcox@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Signed-off-by: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org>
drivers/ata/libata-core.c
include/linux/libata.h