dm cache policy mq: simplify ability to promote sequential IO to the cache

[uclinux-h8/linux.git] / Documentation / device-mapper / cache-policies.txt

diff --git a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
index 7746e5d..0d124a9 100644 (file)
--- a/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
+++ b/Documentation/device-mapper/cache-policies.txt
@@ -47,16 +47,22 @@ Message and constructor argument pairs are:
        'discard_promote_adjustment <value>'
 
 The sequential threshold indicates the number of contiguous I/Os
-required before a stream is treated as sequential.  The random threshold
+required before a stream is treated as sequential.  Once a stream is
+considered sequential it will bypass the cache.  The random threshold
 is the number of intervening non-contiguous I/Os that must be seen
 before the stream is treated as random again.
 
 The sequential and random thresholds default to 512 and 4 respectively.
 
-Large, sequential ios are probably better left on the origin device
-since spindles tend to have good bandwidth. The io_tracker counts
-contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the io is in one of these sequential
-modes.
+Large, sequential I/Os are probably better left on the origin device
+since spindles tend to have good sequential I/O bandwidth.  The
+io_tracker counts contiguous I/Os to try to spot when the I/O is in one
+of these sequential modes.  But there are use-cases for wanting to
+promote sequential blocks to the cache (e.g. fast application startup).
+If sequential threshold is set to 0 the sequential I/O detection is
+disabled and sequential I/O will no longer implicitly bypass the cache.
+Setting the random threshold to 0 does _not_ disable the random I/O
+stream detection.
 
 Internally the mq policy determines a promotion threshold.  If the hit
 count of a block not in the cache goes above this threshold it gets