More SD Card issues

[Chris Johns]

Robert S. Grimes wrote:
> The SD card driver seems to be working pretty well.  A simple test where 
> I write one megabyte of data in 256 byte chunks takes about 57 seconds, 
> for ~18.5 kilobytes/second to disk  This seems pretty reasonable, as the 
> data sheet says the "Block Write Access Time" for "Binary Products" is 
> 24 milliseconds typical, 250 milliseconds max; using the 24 ms for 512 
> byte blocks, which translates to 21,333 kilobytes per second.  Seem right?
> 

Well done on getting your SD card up and running.

I can only comment on the performance side of things and it would seem fine 
given the figure you provide. The write of a single file in this way is good 
but a better test is to copy a groups of files. With the right cache setting I 
would hope to see the same performance.

I did some analysis of the cache once I had completed my changes. I ran my 
tests on a 300MHz Pentium Compact PC with 512M of RAM and a 4.3G Fujitsu 
(MPD3043AT) disk. I formatted the disk using FreeDOS and then copied the 
install directory from the CDROM to disk. I then used the shell in RTEMS to 
make copies of the install directory in a tree layout until I had 26.176M of 
data in 1215 files and 168 directories. One directory had 305 files so this 
pushed the limits on the file system and the cache. The RTEMS shell copy 
command is the BSD shell copy command and it does a couple of stats on the 
directory for a file that is not present and so all 305 entries needed to be 
checked. The table shows the results for various cache sizes:

           Buffers  RA  WB Time (secs) Rate (KB/sec) Files/sec
Default     64     32  16     495       52.862        2.45
            512     32  16     140      186.907        8.68
            512     64  32     130      201.284        9.35
           1024     64  32     105      249.209       11.57

Buffers = number of buffers in the pool (512 bytes)
RA = number of read-ahead buffers
WB = number of write-back buffers

The data rate is half the actual rate on the bus because we had to read this 
data into memory then write it out. The 512K cache did help. An interesting 
thing was the sound of the disk for each of these settings. The default was 
bashing the disk and lots of noise. The last set of values was quiet and the 
disk did not sound under any stress.

A look at the shell's cpuuse command showed 80% of the time was spent in the 
ATA task, 8% in the file system and copy code and 12% in idle. That idle time 
is interesting and I am not sure why it was there. For this type of disk the 
ATA driver is where the effort would need to be spent to improve performance.

Regards
Chris