Speed up AAOne

Copied from a post by trumpeldor in the beginners section, dramatically increased the speed of my AA1, SSD version with Linpus and an extra half gig of RAM, it deserves a post of it's own in here.

Keith

-----copy------


According to this post I found, concerning SSD, the following will greatly increase read and write performance on your SSD-disk (which happens to be the type of disk the Acer Aspire One has, the Linux-version anyway).

Simply do the following:

$ sudo su -
# mousepad /boot/grub/grub.conf

Now, add the elevator=noop option to the kernel-line, making this line:

kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x311 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer

look like this:

kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x311 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer elevator=noop

Save the file, close it, and reboot. Some have reported that there’s an increase in writespeeds going from 7.1MB/s to 9.1MB/s by adding this change. If it works or not, well, you can be the judge of that.



_________end copy_________


I've been using it for several hours now, including several reboots, and it's stable and MUCH quicker.


Keith

 

hi there,

I applied this and the lappie does feel marginally faster - how did you test the read/write speed of the SSD? I'd like to run some benchmarks

 

I didn't benchmark the performance before the mod, so cannot give a direct comparison, it just 'feels' much faster.


Keith

 

The modification prevents the 'ordering' of information to be written to the drive. On normal hard drives this is faster because of the head seek times and it creates a much smoother transition of the head across the platter. On a SSD there is no head, or seek time. Because of this you can remove elevator process (what the ordering of data is called) and it speeds up I/O.

How much? I don't know... But I just added the statement to my AAO and will see what sort of performance 'increase' I 'feel' shortly... especially since I'm almost always skeptical...

 

Visually this works GREAT! I was skeptical, but not now. Be sure to save your original grub.conf to a new name in case you want to go back.

 

Can anyone explan what the setting actually do?
Does this also work on HDD machines?

Cheers,
Tony

 

It has to do with how the kernel orders disk i/o

ie, if a bunch of i/o requests come in, which one gets to go first.

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/008jun05 ... chedulers/

 

Its SAFE to do that???

 

yep pretty much, it's just a different way of handling data

 

This change is SAFE but whether it is SMART is based on what you are doing.

The issue is that it applies to all "disk" devices attached to the AA1. If all you have is SSD and SD/SDHC cards then it is the CORRECT setting as these devices don't need the kernel sorting I/O operations for them. This setting feeds blocks to the device ASAP and helps keep it well stuffed with data to write.

However, if you are attaching a HDD through the USB port then this setting will slow down write operations with that HDD. This setting would also be bad news for an AA1 with a HDD instead of a SSD as it would negatively impact write performance.

At some point the Linux kernel will need to be updated to support device specific I/O sorting. But for now you get to pick which device type you will be writing to the most.

 

thanks for this post. feels significantly faster indeed.

 

For a detailed technical description (in german) look here:
http://www.linux-magazin.de/layout/set/ ... /full/3596

According to some tests of Andrew Morton the noop setting is worse for real harddrives.
I guess the positive effect of speeding up SD access is because the overhead inside
the kernel is limited and the SD has random access anyway as there is no moving head
whose movement could be optimized.

 

for HDD users. AHCI is the key

viewtopic.php?t=2830

 

What about this?...

 

My lame boot time benchmark (a stopwatch) seemed exactly the same with "noop" and "deadline". "noop" apparently has a lower CPU overhead, so that may mean something somewhere, or it might not. I imagine it's a question of weather we're doing lots of/occasional larger reads (making the overhead worth it) or many smaller ones (not), but I'm still new to this.

 

On my AA1 the line reads diffeently.
Does anyone know if the speed up access works here and where the new command should be placed?

kernel /boot/bzImage ro root=LABEL=linpus vga=0x311 splash=silent loglevel=1 console=tty1 quiet nolapic_timer initrd /boot/initrd-splash.img

 

First things first, great idea - this should help

Second: Screwing up grub.conf can cause the AAO to not boot anymore (as this is the bootloader config)
Third: This can be set per device through sysfs:
Change it on the fly with `echo noop > /sys/block/${DEVICE}/queue/scheduler` , where $DEVICE is sda with standard SSD aspire one, so:
echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler
does the same only for the SSD / first harddisk. This could be put into the rc.local, but is only effective then for the SSD.

HTH

Steffen

 

I feel it's fast and safe. Just ran it and it's perfect I have the 8GB model with a 1GB SD Card in the port and a 2 GB USB Flash Key. It "feels" like the data is running twice as fast between my AA1 and my flash key, and I have the FTP Client update downloaded from the Acer website itself aswell as the DVD Writer. No problems whatsoever.

DITman
Dublin, Ireland

 

WARNING.
I added the elevator=noop line to the conf file and my machine kernel panic'd ad wouldnt boot. I had to buy a live usb linux distro to get my at my files, then did a full recovery reinstall.

On the positive side, it seems the version of Linpus I had installed from new was crappy compared to the one on the recovery cd...hmm, you would've thought them to be the same!

I have just entered the echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler line ... we shall see what difference it makes.

btw can I make the echo noop > /sys/block/sda/queue/scheduler a permanent entry somewhere, rather than an on the fly one?

 

Can anyone tell me how to put the 'on the fly' method in a startup file? It does have a noticable effect on the speed of the computer. The menu.1st method doesnt work for me as the file doesnt exsist!