mpr vs mps performance

[Douglas Gilbert]

On 14-10-07 12:19 PM, Borja Marcos wrote:
>
> On Oct 7, 2014, at 6:11 PM, Alan Somers wrote:
>
>>> Borja, can you upgrade your card to the latest FW.  Your version is really
>>> old (1.00.03.00).  We should be up to 7.00.00.00 now.  There could be a lot
>>> of fixes that would affect performance.
>>
>> To update the firmware, you must download LSI's
>> Installer_P6_for_FreeBSD from the link below.  Then the tricky part:
>> you must hexedit the executable and replace all "mps3_" strings with
>> "mpr", suitably padded with NULLs.  It sucks, I know; complain to
>> LSI/Avago.  Then you must download the
>> 9300_8e_Package_P6_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows (or whichever is
>> appropriate for your hardware) to get the actual firmware files.  Then
>> you can use the hacked FreeBSD installer binary to download the
>> firmware from the Windows firmware package.
>>
>> http://www.lsi.com/support/pages/download-results.aspx?component=Storage+Component&productfamily=Host+Bus+Adapters&productcode=P00766&assettype=0&productname=LSI+SAS+9300-8e
>
> Thanks, I'll try. Probably the SAS2 cards will go into production but I'm happy to help with some tests.
>
> The performance problem was not sustained, but writing performance stalled for several seconds now and then. It did not happen with the SAS2 HBA (which is a Dell branded as H200 flashed to IT firmware).

I'm not seeing a big difference between FreeBSD and Linux
using a LSI SAS-3 HBA with a 12 Gbps SAS SSD.

With the same 9300-4i HBA (P6 firmware (where is P7 that
Stephen mentioned ??)) and the same disk (SEAGATE ST200FM0073
0005), using Linux as the client:

Via iSCSI against FreeNAS 9.3-M4 (nightly build, 3 days old):
# ddpt --odx if=/dev/sg5 bs=512 of=/dev/sg5 seek=4m count=4m
4194304+0 records in
4194304+0 records out
time to transfer data: 11.275797 secs at 190.45 MB/sec

On Linux lk 3.17.0 against the same disk, directly connected:
# ddpt if=/dev/sg2 bs=512 of=/dev/sg2 seek=4m count=4m
4194304+0 records in
4194304+0 records out
time to transfer data: 10.807345 secs at 198.71 MB/sec


The SSD is probably not optimized for an "up-copy" like
that. With raw READs it yields better than 700 MB/sec,
using both ports it yields better than 900 MB/sec.

"--odx" is a Microsoft term for a token based remote
copy. It was proposed to T10 as "XCOPYv2: Extended Copy
Plus & Lite" and the result is found in SBC-3.

Doug Gilbert