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>

2 files changed, 19 insertions, 5 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.
diff --git a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
index e164403f60e1..f65274081c8d 100644
--- a/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
+++ b/Documentation/block/queue-sysfs.txt
@@ -25,11 +25,11 @@ size allowed by the hardware.
 
 nomerges (RW)
 -------------
-This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO merging
-requests in the block layer. Merging may still occur through a direct
-1-hit cache, since that comes for (almost) free. The IO scheduler will not
-waste cycles doing tree/hash lookups for merges if nomerges is 1. Defaults
-to 0, enabling all merges.
+This enables the user to disable the lookup logic involved with IO
+merging requests in the block layer. By default (0) all merges are
+enabled. When set to 1 only simple one-hit merges will be tried. When
+set to 2 no merge algorithms will be tried (including one-hit or more
+complex tree/hash lookups).
 
 nr_requests (RW)
 ----------------