USB performance vs governor

[Daniel Kulp]

I'm been trying to track down why the USB performance on my BBB's has been abysmal.  I've discovered that the default on-demand governor is definitely a major contributor to the slowdown.   

Basically, with the ondemand governor, I'm seeing read performance off of a USB3 thumb drive of well under 2MB/sec.   In other words, really slow.   For example:

root@FPP:/home/fpp# uname -a

Linux FPP 4.14.60-ti-r67 #1 SMP PREEMPT Sat Aug 4 19:54:06 UTC 2018 armv7l GNU/Linux
root@FPP:/home/fpp# cpufreq-set -g ondemand

root@FPP:/home/fpp# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=32

32+0 records in

32+0 records out

33554432 bytes (34 MB, 32 MiB) copied, 24.9291 s, 1.3 MB/s

root@FPP:/home/fpp# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=32

32+0 records in

32+0 records out

33554432 bytes (34 MB, 32 MiB) copied, 22.283 s, 1.5 MB/s

  (yes.. "dd" isn't a great benchmark, but it's trivial to show the issue).  Once I switch to the performance governor, things improve quite a bit:

root@FPP:/home/fpp# cpufreq-set -g performance
root@FPP:/home/fpp# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=64
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
67108864 bytes (67 MB, 64 MiB) copied, 6.96759 s, 9.6 MB/s
root@FPP:/home/fpp# dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=64
64+0 records in
64+0 records out
67108864 bytes (67 MB, 64 MiB) copied, 6.98015 s, 9.6 MB/s

It's still not anywhere near what a Raspberry Pi is able to do with the same thumb drive (30MB/s), but it's a huge improvement.   

Is there any setting or anything that can be used to improve the read performance of the USB besides locking the CPU at 1Ghz?

[Robert Nelson]

PERFORMANCE should be the default governor, for a long time it was on-demand..

If you know what USB devices you'll be plugging in, switch the MUSB
DMA mode from the cpu to cppi4.1 via:

diff --git a/patches/defconfig b/patches/defconfig
index 661d1a5..31a8caf 100644
--- a/patches/defconfig
+++ b/patches/defconfig
@@ -4601,7 +4601,8 @@ CONFIG_USB_MUSB_AM335X_CHILD=y
#
# MUSB DMA mode
#
-CONFIG_MUSB_PIO_ONLY=y
+# CONFIG_MUSB_PIO_ONLY is not set
+CONFIG_USB_TI_CPPI41_DMA=y
CONFIG_USB_DWC3=y
# CONFIG_USB_DWC3_HOST is not set
# CONFIG_USB_DWC3_GADGET is not set

You "will" lose compatibly with some usb devices. (most the wifi
ones..).. But for mass storage it should be fine..

Regards,

--
Robert Nelson
https://rcn-ee.com/

[Daniel Kulp]

This was with the latest debian stretch image from beaglebone.org with an updated kernel.  It seems to be using ondemand by default.   

I need wifi support as well. :(

Dan

[Jason Kridner]

Are there e2e bug reports for dongles that fail when DMA mode is used?

>
> Regards,
>
> --
> Robert Nelson
> https://rcn-ee.com/
>

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