[PATCH] block/stat.txt

I couldn't find any docs explaining the contents of /sys/block/<dev>/stat,
so I wrote up the following.  I'm not completely sure it's accurate - Jens,
could you give a yea or nay on this?

In particular, the counts of read/write IOs and read/write sectors are
incremented in different places - it looks like they both increment as the
request is being finished, but I'm not completely sure of that.

Cc: Jens Axboe <axboe@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

1 files changed, 82 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/block/stat.txt b/Documentation/block/stat.txt
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+Block layer statistics in /sys/block/<dev>/stat
+===============================================
+
+This file documents the contents of the /sys/block/<dev>/stat file.
+
+The stat file provides several statistics about the state of block
+device <dev>.
+
+Q. Why are there multiple statistics in a single file?  Doesn't sysfs
+   normally contain a single value per file?
+A. By having a single file, the kernel can guarantee that the statistics
+   represent a consistent snapshot of the state of the device.  If the
+   statistics were exported as multiple files containing one statistic
+   each, it would be impossible to guarantee that a set of readings
+   represent a single point in time.
+
+The stat file consists of a single line of text containing 11 decimal
+values separated by whitespace.  The fields are summarized in the
+following table, and described in more detail below.
+
+Name            units         description
+----            -----         -----------
+read I/Os       requests      number of read I/Os processed
+read merges     requests      number of read I/Os merged with in-queue I/O
+read sectors    sectors       number of sectors read
+read ticks      milliseconds  total wait time for read requests
+write I/Os      requests      number of write I/Os processed
+write merges    requests      number of write I/Os merged with in-queue I/O
+write sectors   sectors       number of sectors written
+write ticks     milliseconds  total wait time for write requests
+in_flight       requests      number of I/Os currently in flight
+io_ticks        milliseconds  total time this block device has been active
+time_in_queue   milliseconds  total wait time for all requests
+
+read I/Os, write I/Os
+=====================
+
+These values increment when an I/O request completes.
+
+read merges, write merges
+=========================
+
+These values increment when an I/O request is merged with an
+already-queued I/O request.
+
+read sectors, write sectors
+===========================
+
+These values count the number of sectors read from or written to this
+block device.  The "sectors" in question are the standard UNIX 512-byte
+sectors, not any device- or filesystem-specific block size.  The
+counters are incremented when the I/O completes.
+
+read ticks, write ticks
+=======================
+
+These values count the number of milliseconds that I/O requests have
+waited on this block device.  If there are multiple I/O requests waiting,
+these values will increase at a rate greater than 1000/second; for
+example, if 60 read requests wait for an average of 30 ms, the read_ticks
+field will increase by 60*30 = 1800.
+
+in_flight
+=========
+
+This value counts the number of I/O requests that have been issued to
+the device driver but have not yet completed.  It does not include I/O
+requests that are in the queue but not yet issued to the device driver.
+
+io_ticks
+========
+
+This value counts the number of milliseconds during which the device has
+had I/O requests queued.
+
+time_in_queue
+=============
+
+This value counts the number of milliseconds that I/O requests have waited
+on this block device.  If there are multiple I/O requests waiting, this
+value will increase as the product of the number of milliseconds times the
+number of requests waiting (see "read ticks" above for an example).