Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756185Ab3I3P30 (ORCPT ); Mon, 30 Sep 2013 11:29:26 -0400 Received: from mx1.redhat.com ([209.132.183.28]:6929 "EHLO mx1.redhat.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755307Ab3I3P3V (ORCPT ); Mon, 30 Sep 2013 11:29:21 -0400 Message-ID: <52498AA8.2090204@redhat.com> Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2013 09:28:56 -0500 From: Ric Wheeler User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20130805 Thunderbird/17.0.8 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Miklos Szeredi CC: "J. Bruce Fields" , "Myklebust, Trond" , Zach Brown , Anna Schumaker , Kernel Mailing List , Linux-Fsdevel , "linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org" , "Schumaker, Bryan" , "Martin K. Petersen" , Jens Axboe , Mark Fasheh , Joel Becker , Eric Wong Subject: Re: [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading References: <20130925210742.GG30372@lenny.home.zabbo.net> <20130926185508.GO30372@lenny.home.zabbo.net> <5244A68F.906@redhat.com> <20130927200550.GA22640@fieldses.org> <20130927205013.GZ30372@lenny.home.zabbo.net> <4FA345DA4F4AE44899BD2B03EEEC2FA9467EF2D7@SACEXCMBX04-PRD.hq.netapp.com> <52474839.2080201@redhat.com> <20130930143432.GG16579@fieldses.org> <52499026.3090802@redhat.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2788 Lines: 63 On 09/30/2013 10:24 AM, Miklos Szeredi wrote: > On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 4:52 PM, Ric Wheeler wrote: >> On 09/30/2013 10:51 AM, Miklos Szeredi wrote: >>> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 4:34 PM, J. Bruce Fields >>> wrote: >>>>> My other worry is about interruptibility/restartability. Ideas? >>>>> >>>>> What happens on splice(from, to, 4G) and it's a non-reflink copy? >>>>> Can the page cache copy be made restartable? Or should splice() be >>>>> allowed to return a short count? What happens on (non-reflink) remote >>>>> copies and huge request sizes? >>>> If I were writing an application that required copies to be restartable, >>>> I'd probably use the largest possible range in the reflink case but >>>> break the copy into smaller chunks in the splice case. >>>> >>> The app really doesn't want to care about that. And it doesn't want >>> to care about restartability, etc.. It's something the *kernel* has >>> to care about. You just can't have uninterruptible syscalls that >>> sleep for a "long" time, otherwise first you'll just have annoyed >>> users pressing ^C in vain; then, if the sleep is even longer, warnings >>> about task sleeping too long. >>> >>> One idea is letting splice() return a short count, and so the app can >>> safely issue SIZE_MAX requests and the kernel can decide if it can >>> copy the whole file in one go or if it wants to do it in smaller >>> chunks. >>> >> You cannot rely on a short count. That implies that an offloaded copy starts >> at byte 0 and the short count first bytes are all valid. > Huh? > > - app calls splice(from, 0, to, 0, SIZE_MAX) > 1) VFS calls ->direct_splice(from, 0, to, 0, SIZE_MAX) > 1.a) fs reflinks the whole file in a jiffy and returns the size of the file > 1 b) fs does copy offload of, say, 64MB and returns 64M > 2) VFS does page copy of, say, 1MB and returns 1MB > - app calls splice(from, X, to, X, SIZE_MAX) where X is the new offset > ... > > The point is: the app is always doing the same (incrementing offset > with the return value from splice) and the kernel can decide what is > the best size it can service within a single uninterruptible syscall. > > Wouldn't that work? > > Thanks, > Miklos No. Keep in mind that the offload operation in (1) might fail partially. The target file (the copy) is allocated, the question is what ranges have valid data. I don't see that (2) is interesting or really needed to be done in the kernel. If nothing else, it tends to confuse the discussion.... ric -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/