maxphys

Description

Defines the maximum size of physical I/O requests. If a driver encounters a request larger than this size, the driver breaks the request into maxphys sized chunks. File systems can and do impose their own limit.

Data Type

Signed integer

Default

131,072 (sun4u or sun4v) or 57,344 (x86). The sd driver uses the value of 1,048,576 if the drive supports wide transfers. The ssd driver uses 1,048,576 by default.

Range

Machine-specific page size to MAXINT

Units

Bytes

Dynamic?

Yes, but many file systems load this value into a per-mount point data structure when the file system is mounted. A number of drivers load the value at the time a device is attached to a driver-specific data structure.

Validation

None

When to Change

When doing I/O to and from raw devices in large chunks. Note that a DBMS doing OLTP operations issues large numbers of small I/Os. Changing maxphys does not result in any performance improvement in that case.

Commitment Level

Unstable