Significant USB performance enhancement

[Cryptic]

Hi All!

I noticed that Maxtor's Shared Storage NAS has similar hardware to my wl500gx, but far better USB performance. After going through the sources, I noticed that Maxtor added some extra initialisation for the VT1622 USB controller. I ported those to Oleg's firmware and I got a 25% speed increase!

Patch attached.

Groeten,
Bart

hdparm -tT before:
/dev/discs/disc2/part7:
Timing cached reads: 144 MB in 2.03 seconds = 70.94 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 16 MB in 3.16 seconds = 5.06 MB/sec
and after:
/dev/discs/disc2/part7:
Timing cached reads: 148 MB in 2.03 seconds = 72.91 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 20 MB in 3.23 seconds = 6.19 MB/sec

smbclient before:
smb: \> get big.bin
getting file \big.bin of size 479987340 as big.bin (1213.6 kb/s) (average 1213.6 kb/s)
smb: \>
and after:
smb: \> get big.bin
getting file \big.bin of size 479987340 as big.bin (1531.8 kb/s) (average 1531.8 kb/s)
smb: \>

[LeperKing]

Good job!

Was porting it to olegs fairly straightforward or should we wait for him to release it with the new usb code?

Thanks,
LK.

[Cryptic]

No, it was easy. Just a simple patch to two files in drivers/usb/host/ .

Unfortunately. the network performance of the wl500gx is stilll quite bad. Even ftp-ing a file from /tmp (so out of RAM) gets less than 2 Mb/s. I am beginning to wonder if the ethernet driver uses DMA...

The maxtor reaches 5Mb/s over the network but seems to use a differnet network chip.

[Cryptic]

Hmmm, after taking a second look it seems that Maxtor also uses a BCM47xx-ish ethernet chip, but without the robo-switch. And I can't imagine the switch is slowing things down so much.

I tried Maxtor's et.o but I lost vlan0 and vlan1 after unloading the original et.o, and I couldn't get them back after loading the new one. It did recognize the chip however. After much poking around I found robocfg, but it complained about unsupported protocol or something (any hints?) and then it was definitely time to get some sleep. Maxtor's driver also includes an etc_robo.o, so I suppose I stand a chance of getting this to work.

My Shared Storage Plus is in the mail, no personal experiences yet, but here is a link. Note the phenomenal (relative to wl500gx) performance for ethernet. And USB read performance maxes out at around 6Mb/s, same as I now get with the ASUS.

http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...or-ssd200.html

Groeten,
Bart

[Oleg]

This USB patch is in the wl500gp sources too. I've applied it already and it's available in my beta for 2 weeks or so.

As for ethernet perfromance - different chips, higher frequency, different performance. wl500gp is able to route 10.6 megabytes (!!!) per second.

[Cryptic]

Cool! Too bad I can't take credit for this discovery then .

A shame about the network though. It really looks as if the ethernet is a cpu hog that wastes 100 cycles/byte (I get 2Mbyte/s ftp-ing from RAM). I was hoping there would be a magical fix in the driver. 10Mb/s is far more than can be attributed to the difference in clock alone. So the ethernet core in the 500gp is a better one.

Silly in a way to build a router with lousy routing performance.

Did you try the 500gp's et.o on 500gx?

[Oleg]

Cool! Too bad I can't take credit for this discovery then .

A shame about the network though. It really looks as if the ethernet is a cpu hog that wastes 100 cycles/byte (I get 2Mbyte/s ftp-ing from RAM). I was hoping there would be a magical fix in the driver. 10Mb/s is far more than can be attributed to the difference in clock alone. So the ethernet core in the 500gp is a better one.

Silly in a way to build a router with lousy routing performance.

Did you try the 500gp's et.o on 500gx?

They're the same in my firmware. In fact, the firmware is the same with except of web pages. Actually the difference is a picture with a router name.

[Cryptic]

So WL500gx is crappy by design. Too bad.

What kind of NAS performance do you get with 500gP? Close to 6 Mbyte/s?

[Oleg]

Networked read 3 megabytes per second, writes 2.5. Used NFS.

Raw (USB to memory) is about 6/5.

[Cryptic]

3 Mbyte/s is awfully close to the 2 Mbyte/s on 500gx if you take the difference in clockspeed into account.

However, that is nowhere near the 6 Mbyte/s that Maxtor is supposed to do on the same hardware (but I didn't check that myself). Strange...

[Oleg]

Maxtor is using IDE disk directly, not the USB bridge.

wl700g gives the same as maxtor nas.

[Cryptic]

No, if you look at http://www.digit-life.com/articles2/...or-ssd200.html it looks as if Maxtor does 8 Mbyte/s on the internal disk and 6 Mbyte/s on USB.

But as I said, I couldn't check this myself yet.

[wtzm]

wl500gp is able to route 10.6 megabytes (!!!) per second.

In what configuration did you measure this speed?

[Oleg]

In what configuration did you measure this speed?

7f-pre4 firmware

P4-2.8 Ghz <-> Deluxe LAN - Deluxe LAN <-> Premium WAN - Premium LAN <-> P3-1.13 GHz

Both PCs are running linux, used ttcp for tests. Premium is in home gateway mode, 32 MB enabled. With 16MB I've got 9.6 only.

[wtzm]

Nice!
I would have thought that this speed can only be reached with (software) bridging, not with routing.

EDIT: Was this speed achieved with NAT enabled?