Re: [PATCH -mm 4/5][AIO] - AIO completion signal notification

[Jakub Jelinek <jakub@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Nov 29, 2006 at 11:33:01AM +0100, S?bastien Dugu? wrote:
>                       AIO completion signal notification
> 
>   The current 2.6 kernel does not support notification of user space via
> an RT signal upon an asynchronous IO completion. The POSIX specification
> states that when an AIO request completes, a signal can be delivered to
> the application as notification.
> 
>   This patch adds a struct sigevent *aio_sigeventp to the iocb.
> The relevant fields (pid, signal number and value) are stored in the kiocb
> for use when the request completes.
> 
>   That sigevent structure is filled by the application as part of the AIO
> request preparation. Upon request completion, the kernel notifies the
> application using those sigevent parameters. If SIGEV_NONE has been specified,
> then the old behaviour is retained and the application must rely on polling
> the completion queue using io_getevents().

Well, from what I see applications must rely on polling the completion
queue using io_getevents() in any case, isn't that the only way how to free
the kernel resources associated with the AIO request, even if it uses
SIGEV_SIGNAL or thread notification?  aio_error/aio_return/aio_suspend
will still need to io_getevents, the only important difference with this
patch is that a) the polling doesn't need to be asynchronous (i.e. have
a special thread which just loops doing io_getevents)
b) it doesn't need to care about notification itself.

	Jakub