This improves performance when reading the snapshot origin.
Note: in my testing, it actually degraded performance in some settings, I
traced it to Maxtor disks having problems with > 512-sector requests.
Reducing the number of sectors to /sys/block/sd*/queue/max_sectors_kb to
256 fixed the read performance. I think we don't have to care about weird
disks that actually degrade performance because of large requests being
sent to them.
Mikulas
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Implement merge method for snapshot origin
Without merge method, dm asks the upper layers to submit smallest possible
bios --- one page. Submitting such small bios impacts performance negatively
when reading or writing the origin device.
Without this patch, CPU consumption when reading the origin on lvm on md-raid0
was 6 to 12%, with this patch, it drops to 1 to 4%.