mappings required by mdstart_swap(). On i386, if the ephemeral mapping
is already in the sf_buf mapping cache, a swap-backed md performs
similarly to a malloc-backed md. Even if the ephemeral mapping is not
cached, this implementation is still faster. On 64-bit platforms, this
change has the effect of using the direct virtual-to-physical mapping,
avoiding ephemeral mapping overheads, such as TLB shootdowns on SMPs.
On a 2.4GHz, 400MHz FSB P4 Xeon configured with 64K sf_bufs and
"mdmfs -S -o async -s 128m md /mnt"
before:
dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=64k
134217728 bytes transferred in 0.430923 secs (311465697 bytes/sec)
after with cold sf_buf cache:
dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=64k
134217728 bytes transferred in 0.367948 secs (364773576 bytes/sec)
after with warm sf_buf cache:
dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=64k
134217728 bytes transferred in 0.252826 secs (530870010 bytes/sec)
malloc-backed md:
dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null bs=64k
134217728 bytes transferred in 0.253126 secs (530240978 bytes/sec)
7cd53fdda8