[Xen-devel] Does Xen hypervisor overwrite O_DIRECT setting of Linux 2.6 kernel?

["Liang Yang" <multisyncfe991@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

I'm doing some I/O performance analysis on Xen now. I noticed some weird 
thing when comparing the I/O performance data of Xen domain0 and Linux 
native. For sequential READ performance (no matter small packet or large 
packet), Linux native shows better performance than Xen domain0 (this is 
expected). However, for sequential write of small packet (512B and 1KB 
packets), Xen domain0 always outperforms the Linux native a lot. I ran the 
performance for several times and the results are pretty consistent.
The performance data is collected on 8 SAS drives (used as physical drives) 
and IOMeter is used as the benchmark tool. The latest IOMeter version used 
O_DIRECT. We know, Linux 2.6 kernel starts supporting O_DIRECT which makes 
all I/O requests work around buffer cache. The good thing for O_DIRECT is it 
reduces the CPU utilization and cache pollution. The bad thing is O_DIRECT 
not only forces all I/O requests become synchronous and no I/O coalescing 
will happen. Thus sequential write of small packets will be impacted most. 
For Xen, however, I believe Xen hypervisor overwrites this O_DIRECT setting 
and maybe it favors better performance over CPU and FSB utilization. Thus 
Xen domain0 can have better write performance than Linux native.
Is this correct?


Thanks,


Liang




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