Patent Application
20110099306
A Port Multiplier (PM) device allows a single active serial advanced technology advancement (SATA) host port to communicate with up to 15 attached devices, providing a cost effective method for Multiple drives to be attached to the single host port and making it transparent for the attached drives. A Port Multiplier can accommodate both Conunand Based Switching (CBS) and frame information structure (FIS)-Based Switching (FBS). CBS is similar to having a single device attached to the host port, where commands tagged with a Port Multiplier Port (PMP) number are sent to the device one at a time. FBS mode however allows the host to establish conummication with multiple devices simultaneously, thus maximizing link bandwidth utilization by allowing high performance storage connections to multiple drives.
In FBS mode, multiple PMPs can have commands outstanding. Native command queuing (NCQ) allows reordering of outstanding commands to reduce mechanical overhead in SATA hard disk drives for optimal performance. Therefore, if one command at a time is sent to the device then the drive will have only one outstanding command at a time and only one command at a time is queued, which inhibits any command queue re-ordering capability and thus all the benefits of the NCQ are lost.
Embodiments may provide for maximum performance by sending multiple back-to-back commands to multiple devices attached to a Port Multiplier (PM). In various embodiments, idle bus bandwidth in FIS Based Switching (FBS) mode may be fully utilized by dispatching commands to multiple Port Multiplier Ports (PMPs) (i.e., multiple devices) behind a PM. By queuing multiple commands even in FBS mode with multiple active devices, greater performance gains may be realized by taking full advantage of Native Command Queuing (NCQ). By providing such enqueuing, a hard disk drive's internal command queue may be prevented from becoming empty by replenishing the command queue as fast as possible for all the active devices, thus utilizing the bus bandwidth to maximum.
To implement embodiments of the present invention, a host may lock the SATA link by sending one synchronization (SYNC) primitive to the device and sustaining a transmit ready (XRDY) primitive. More specifically, via such link locking in FBS mode back-to-back Command FIS (CFIS) transmissions to multiple devices behind the Port Multiplier may be performed. This algorithm takes advantage of the fact that the transmission time for each CFIS is relatively very short as compared to the response time from the device. The aggressive bus ownership with 1-SYNC locking and transmission is needed because hard disk drives may take several micro-seconds to respond, thus allowing a host controller, such as may be present in a chipset component such as an input/output controller hub (ICH), to dispatch back-to-back commands FISs to various devices. By enabling the host to send CFISs aggressively, the number of actively operating PMPs simultaneously can be maximized, in turn maximizing higher bandwidth utilization of e.g., a 3 gigabytes per second (Gb/s) host link. Piggy-backing CFISes aggressively on a received or transmitted FIS from the device allows multiple CFIS transmissions in burst mode, thus replenishing the PMPs with commands as quickly as possible and in addition filling the drive's command queue to gain maximum performance from NCQ.
Input/output (I/O) devices, such as I/O devices 60, 65, and 70, are coupled to a south bridge 34 of chipset 30 through one or more I/O interconnects. In one embodiment, the interconnects may be Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) interconnects and I/O device 70 is a network interface card. In one embodiment, I/O devices 60 and 65 are SATA devices such as a hard disk, a compact disk (CD) drive, or a digital video disc (DVD) drive. In this embodiment, a SATA host controller 36, which may be in accordance with the SATA Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) rev. 1.1 (or another such specification), may be located within chipset 30 and is coupled to a port multiplier 50 behind which I/O devices 60 and 65 are coupled, where the number of I/O devices may comprise 0, 1 or a plurality of I/O devices. In one embodiment, the SATA AHCI 36 is located within south bridge 34 of the chipset 30. Host controller 36 allows I/O devices 60 and 65 to communicate with the rest of the computer system.
Referring now to
As shown in
Buffer management module 130 has 2 modes, 1-CFIS mode and 3-CFIS mode depending on the CFIS length specified in the command list of the command slot. As will be described further below, management of buffer 132 may be controlled by incoming control signals received from a multiplexer 145. As shown in
In 3-CFIS queue mode read and write operations to CFIS buffer 132 can be active at the same time, requiring separate buffer-read and buffer-write pointers and an update mechanism to indicate which location within buffer 132 is being read out (for transmission) and which location within buffer 132 is being written (for pending transmission). To handle 3-CFIS queue for FBS, a mechanism may be provided to indicate the number of pending CFISs available in CFIS buffer 132. In the case where a protocol does not allow a transport layer to send a CFIS for the specific PMP, the transport layer can jump to service the next transmittable CFIS.
Referring now to
An opportunistic mode handler 134 (i.e., a 1-CFIS mode handler) may be used to handle transmission of CFIS commands in a conventional manner when the ability to aggressively transmit is unavailable. In various embodiments, mode handlers 134 and 140 may be finite state machines (FSMs), although the scope of the present invention is not limited in this regard. While shown with particular implementation in the embodiments of
To avoid starving PMPs with outstanding commands, buffer management module 130 will never stall and will always allow CFIS to be sent out as quickly as possible. Buffer management module 130 may dynamically change mode from 3-CFIS mode to 1-CFIS mode by looking at the CFIS length in the command header. The CFIS handling mechanism may handle a single device error (SDE) or host controller error. During the single device error, the cleanup will be specific to the queue location for the PMP with error:
The host may instead operate in an opportunistic or passive CFIS mode if the CFIS being transmitted is R_ERR'ed by the device (which may be due to a Port Multiplier internal FIS collision). The CFIS in passive mode will not attempt to lock the link but rather find natural bandwidth for transmission. CFIS transmission will remain in passive mode until any FIS is received from the corresponding PMP.
To increase effectiveness of having 3-CFISes in the CFIS buffer and to avoid any naturally occurring dead-lock (which can impact performance by starving other PMPs), a dropping mechanism may be implemented in the transport layer which makes it possible for one most recently naturally blocked CFIS to be conditionally dropped from the CFIS buffer thus allowing CFIS for other PMPs to be serviced and transmitted. In one embodiment, the criteria to drop the CFIS may be threefold as listed below. If all the three criteria are met, then the CFIS is dropped, which enables the ICH to stream another CFIS fetch from the memory to back fill the void in CFIS buffer. The criteria, in one embodiment includes: CFIS buffer space should be full (meaning all 3-CFIS locations are occupied); CFIS for all PMPs in the CFIS buffer are in data phase as indicated and thus are blocked for transmission; and there are other PMPs which have outstanding commands to be serviced.
Referring now to Table 2 shown is pseudocode in accordance with one embodiment of the present invention.
Thus a host is able to lock a link for transmission by sending a 1-SYNC primitive to the device and then sustaining the X_RDY primitive. As per Port Multiplier specifications, the device will respond to this by sending a receive ready primitive (R_RDY), and if there is any natural FIS transmission collision, it will be resolved by the Port Multiplier sending R_ERR primitive for the corresponding command FIS. Using embodiments of the present invention, a host in FBS mode takes advantage of this process to implement a high performance storage system. More specifically, the host will be able to piggy-back aggressive CFIS(es) right after a transmission/reception of the FIS to/from the Port Multiplier. The Host will engage the link transmission/reception state machine to lock the link by sending a 1-SYNC primitive right after the transmission/reception of the FIS and sustaining XRDY primitive.
The transport layer will indicate to the link layer that an aggressive CFIS is ready to be piggy-backed onto the current FIS in a transaction if any (or all) the CFIS(es) in the CFIS buffer is (are) in aggressive mode. The effect of aggressiveness is engaged if there is at least one CFIS in the CFIS buffer which is in aggressive mode and the link layer transmission/reception state machines are not in an IDLE state. Once the link is locked for CFIS transmission, multiple CFIS(es) from the CFIS buffer can be sent in back-to-back succession before the link lock is released, enabling as many PMPs to be engaged and become active. This algorithm takes advantage of the fact that the transmission time for each CFIS is relatively very short as compared to the response time from the device. The delay in response from the hard disk drive is device specific and the number of devices engaged is application and software dependent.
The following Table 3 shows the criteria to lock the link for CFIS transmission, if a transport layer is indicating aggressive CFIS availability, according to one embodiment.
The advantage of having commands queued in the drive for NCQ is seen when multiple commands are sent to the device. The device builds the request queue and through its algorithm determines to re-order the commands or not. This is only possible if there are multiple commands queued in the drive. In FBS mode, multiple devices can be active at the same time, but replenishing the command queue for each device with sufficient amount of commands in order to perform optimal command re-ordering is a challenge. If instead only one command at a time is sent due to PMP arbitration, command queuing in the drive is inhibited. In this case, the drive receives only one outstanding command at a time, and only one command at a time is queued, thus no re-ordering can occur and all the benefits of the NCQ will be lost.
In contrast, using embodiments of the present invention in FBS mode, queuing up multiple CFIS for different PMPs and link lock will not only enable multiple commands to queue up in the device for NCQ commands but will also keep most devices active at any given time. Implementing the combination of 3-deep buffering with aggressive transmission mode may provide a performance improvement. Current hard disk drives can take anywhere from few micro-seconds to tens of micro-seconds in completing command dispatching sequence. Embodiments enable the otherwise wasted idle bus bandwidth to be fully consumed by a host with new command dispatching. Thus any theoretical idle time on a bus can be fully taken up by the host as long as there are new commands to be dispatched, greatly increasing bus utilization rates.
Embodiments may be implemented in code and may be stored on a storage medium having stored thereon instructions which can be used to program a system to perform the instructions. The storage medium may include, but is not limited to, any type of disk including floppy disks, optical disks, compact disk read-only memories (CD-ROMs), compact disk rewritables (CD-RWs), and magneto-optical disks, semiconductor devices such as read-only memories (ROMs), random access memories (RAMs) such as dynamic random access memories (DRAMs), static random access memories (SRAMs), erasable programmable read-only memories (EPROMs), flash memories, electrically erasable programmable read-only memories (EEPROMs), magnetic or optical cards, or any other type of media suitable for storing electronic instructions.
While the present invention has been described with respect to a limited number of embodiments, those skilled in the art will appreciate numerous modifications and variations therefrom. It is intended that the appended claims cover all such modifications and variations as fall within the true spirit and scope of this present invention.
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parent | 11821874 | Jun 2007 | US |
| Child | 12980636 | US |
