Dell Perc 5/i Performance issues

[Antony Mawer]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 4:50 AM, Scott Long <scottl at samsco.org> wrote:
> I just set up a machine with the following GPT scheme:
>
> =>        34  5853511613  mfid0  GPT  (2.7T)
>          34         128      1  freebsd-boot  (64K)
>         162         862         - free -  (431K)
>        1024     2097152      2  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
>     2098176     4194304      3  freebsd-swap  (2.0G)
>     6292480     2097152      4  freebsd-ufs  (1.0G)
>     8389632   104857600      5  freebsd-ufs  (50G)
>   113247232  5740264414      6  freebsd-ufs  (2.7T)
>  5853511646           1         - free -  (512B)
>
> After the first partition, I created a deliberate gap for alignment, reflected in the second line.  The third line shows a starting offset of sector 1024, which is 512KB.  This should be a good generic start point for most RAID geometries with a stripe size <= 512KB.  The rest are normal /, swap, /var, /usr and /opt partitions.  The single free sector on the final line is probably a calculation error on my part, there's no particular reason for it.
>
> The gpart man page has good descriptions on how to create partitions and make the GPT scheme bootable.  It's not very automated, you'll need to have a calculator handy, but it works.

I scripted this as part of our custom installer - it uses the  same
1MB offset that Vista/Win7 do which should align for anything with a
<= 1MB stripe size:


    # Device to partition
    diskdev="/dev/da0"

    # First partition offset in 512-byte sectors. This should be aligned with
    # any RAID stripe size for maximum performance. 2048 aligns the partition
    # start boundary at the 1MiB, consistent with Vista/Windows 7. This should
    # match all common stripe sizes such as 64kb, 128kb and 256kb.
    root_offset="2048"

    # Boot partition offset. This sits just before our first root partition and
    # stores the boot loader which is used to load the OS.
    boot_offset="2032"

    # Initialise the disk with a GPT partition table
    gpart create -s gpt $diskdev

    #
    # System disk partitioning layout
    #
    gpart add -l boot -t freebsd-boot -s 16 -b $boot_offset $diskdev   # boot p1
    gpart add -l root -t freebsd-ufs  -s 2G -b $root_offset $diskdev   # /    p2
    gpart add -l swap -t freebsd-swap -s 4G                 $diskdev   # swap p3
    gpart add -l var  -t freebsd-ufs  -s 4G                 $diskdev   # /var p4
    gpart add -l usr  -t freebsd-ufs                        $diskdev   # /usr p5

    # Install the gpt boot code (pmbr into the PMBR, gptboot into our
boot partition p1)
    gpart bootcode -b /boot/pmbr -p /boot/gptboot -i 1 $diskdev

    # Make the first partition active
    # (required for older BIOSes to boot from the GPT PMBR)
    echo 'a 1' | fdisk -f - $diskdev

gpart is smart enough to figure out most of the math for you these days...

-- Antony