modularize it so that new transports can be created.
Add a transport for SATA
Add a periph+protocol layer for ATA
Add a driver for AHCI-compliant hardware.
Add a maxio field to CAM so that drivers can advertise their max
I/O capability. Modify various drivers so that they are insulated
from the value of MAXPHYS.
The new ATA/SATA code supports AHCI-compliant hardware, and will override
the classic ATA driver if it is loaded as a module at boot time or compiled
into the kernel. The stack now support NCQ (tagged queueing) for increased
performance on modern SATA drives. It also supports port multipliers.
ATA drives are accessed via 'ada' device nodes. ATAPI drives are
accessed via 'cd' device nodes. They can all be enumerated and manipulated
via camcontrol, just like SCSI drives. SCSI commands are not translated to
their ATA equivalents; ATA native commands are used throughout the entire
stack, including camcontrol. See the camcontrol manpage for further
details. Testing this code may require that you update your fstab, and
possibly modify your BIOS to enable AHCI functionality, if available.
This code is very experimental at the moment. The userland ABI/API has
changed, so applications will need to be recompiled. It may change
further in the near future. The 'ada' device name may also change as
more infrastructure is completed in this project. The goal is to
eventually put all CAM busses and devices until newbus, allowing for
interesting topology and management options.
Few functional changes will be seen with existing SCSI/SAS/FC drivers,
though the userland ABI has still changed. In the future, transports
specific modules for SAS and FC may appear in order to better support
the topologies and capabilities of these technologies.
The modularization of CAM and the addition of the ATA/SATA modules is
meant to break CAM out of the mold of being specific to SCSI, letting it
grow to be a framework for arbitrary transports and protocols. It also
allows drivers to be written to support discrete hardware without
jeopardizing the stability of non-related hardware. While only an AHCI
driver is provided now, a Silicon Image driver is also in the works.
Drivers for ICH1-4, ICH5-6, PIIX, classic IDE, and any other hardware
is possible and encouraged. Help with new transports is also encouraged.
Submitted by: scottl, mav
Approved by: re
1. The FreeBSD driver was setting an interrupt coalesce delay of 1000us
for reasons that I can only speculate on. This was hurting everything
from lame sequential I/O "benchmarks" to legitimate filesystem metadata
operations that relied on serialized barrier writes. One of my
filesystem tests went from 35s to complete down to 6s.
2. Implemented the Performant transport method. Without the fix in
(1), I saw almost no difference. With it, my filesystem tests showed
another 5-10% improvement in speed. It was hard to measure CPU
utilization in any meaningful way, so it's not clear if there was a
benefit there, though there should have been since the interrupt handler
was reduced from 2 or more PCI reads down to 1.
3. Implemented MSI-X. Without any docs on this, I was just taking a
guess, and it appears to only work with the Performant method. This
could be a programming or understanding mistake on my part. While this
by itself made almost no difference to performance since the Performant
method already eliminated most of the synchronous reads over the PCI
bus, it did allow the CISS hardware to stop sharing its interrupt with
the USB hardware, which in turn allowed the driver to become decoupled
from the Giant-locked USB driver stack. This increased performance by
almost 20%. The MSI-X setup was done with 4 vectors allocated, but only
1 vector used since the performant method was told to only use 1 of 4
queues. Fiddling with this might make it work with the simpleq method,
not sure. I did not implement MSI since I have no MSI-specific hardware
in my test lab.
4. Improved the locking in the driver, trimmed some data structures.
This didn't improve test times in any measurable way, but it does look
like it gave a minor improvement to CPU usage when many
processes/threads were doing I/O in parallel. Again, this was hard to
accurately test.
that are on a CISS bus to be exported up to CAM and made available as normal
devices. This will typically add one or two buses to CAM, which will be
numbered starting at 32 to allow room for CISS proxy buses. Also, the CISS
firmware usually hides disk devices, but these can also be exposed as 'pass'
devices if you set the hw.ciss.expose_hidden_physical tunable.
Sponsored by: Tape Laboratories, Inc.
MFC After: 3 days
Logical volumes on these devices show up as LUNs behind another
controller (also known as proxy controller). In order to issue
firmware commands for a volume on a proxy controller, they must be
targeted at the address of the proxy controller it is attached to,
not the Host/PCI controller.
A proxy controller is defined as a device listed in the INQUIRY
PHYSICAL LUNS command who's L2 and L3 SCSI addresses are zero. The
corresponding address returned defines which "bus" the controller
lives on and we use this to create a virtual CAM bus.
A logical volume's addresses first byte defines the logical drive
number. The second byte defines the bus that it is attached to
which corresponds to the BUS of the proxy controller's found or the
Host/PCI controller.
Change event notification to be handled in its own kernel thread.
This is needed since some events may require the driver to sleep
on some operations and this cannot be done during interrupt context.
With this change, it is now possible to create and destroy logical
volumes from FreeBSD, but it requires a native application to
construct the proper firmware commands which is not publicly
available.
Special thanks to John Cagle @ HP for providing remote access to
all the hardware and beating on the storage engineers at HP to
answer my questions.
