block: Skip I/O merges when disabled

The block I/O + elevator + I/O scheduler code spend a lot of time trying
to merge I/Os -- rightfully so under "normal" circumstances. However,
if one were to know that the incoming I/O stream was /very/ random in
nature, the cycles are wasted.

This patch adds a per-request_queue tunable that (when set) disables
merge attempts (beyond the simple one-hit cache check), thus freeing up
a non-trivial amount of CPU cycles.

Signed-off-by: Alan D. Brunelle <alan.brunelle@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>

1 files changed, 3 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/block/elevator.c b/block/elevator.c
index 7253fa05db0a..ac5310ef8270 100644
--- a/block/elevator.c
+++ b/block/elevator.c
@@ -488,6 +488,9 @@ int elv_merge(struct request_queue *q, struct request **req, struct bio *bio)
                 }
         }
 
+        if (blk_queue_nomerges(q))
+                return ELEVATOR_NO_MERGE;
+
         /*
          * See if our hash lookup can find a potential backmerge.
          */