Re: [PATCH v7 0/5] vfs: Non-blockling buffered fs read (page cache only)

[Andrew Morton <akpm-de/tnXTf+JLsfHDXvbKv3WD2FQJk+8+b@public.gmane.org>]

On Fri, 27 Mar 2015 01:48:33 -0700 Christoph Hellwig <hch-wEGCiKHe2LqWVfeAwA7xHQ@public.gmane.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 01:35:16AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > fincore() doesn't have to be ugly.  Please address the design issues I
> > raised.  How is pread2() useful to the class of applications which
> > cannot proceed until all data is available?
> 
> It actually makes them work correctly?  preadv2( ..., DONTWAIT) will
> return -EGAIN, which causes them to bounce to the threadpool where
> they call preadv(...).

(I assume you mean RWF_NONBLOCK)

That isn't how pread2() works.  If the leading one or more pages are
uptodate, pread2() will return a partial read.  Now what?  Either the
application reads the same data a second time via the worker thread
(dumb, but it will usually be a rare case) or it reads the remainder of
the data in the worker thread and splices the data back together. 
Which, as I said, will often result in a second load of the initial
read result into CPU cache.