From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
Subject: Re: New copyfile system call - discuss before LSF?
Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2013 10:29:19 -0800
Message-ID: <20130221182919.GB13435@samba2>
References: <512606DF.5050706@redhat.com>
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Reply-To: Jeremy Allison <jra@samba.org>
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Cc: Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>,
	Linux FS Devel <linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org>,
	"linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
	"Chris L. Mason" <clmason@fusionio.com>,
	Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>,
	Alexander Viro <aviro@redhat.com>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <mkp@mkp.net>, Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.de>
To: "Myklebust, Trond" <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>
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On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 01:51:53PM +0000, Myklebust, Trond wrote:
> On Thu, 2013-02-21 at 12:37 +0100, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > We have debated the need to have a system call to allow for offloading copy 
> > operations, for example to an NFS server (part to the new NFS 4.2 
> > specification), SCSI target device (two different SCSI commands do this), local 
> > file systems (reflink, etc) and I suspect many other possible parts of the stack 
> > could implement this.
> 
> sendfile64() pretty much already has the right arguments for a
> "copyfile", however it would be nice to add a 'flags' parameter: the
> NFSv4.2 version would use that to specify whether or not to copy file
> metadata.

What would be really nice is if sendfile allowed zero-copy
from network socket to a file descriptor. That would help
a *lot* of my small system OEMs (and no splice() just doesn't
cut it :-).

Jeremy.