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From: "J. Bruce Fields" <bfields@fieldses.org>
To: Zach Brown <zab@redhat.com>
Cc: Anna Schumaker <schumaker.anna@gmail.com>,
	Szeredi Miklos <miklos@szeredi.hu>,
	linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org,
	"linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org" <linux-nfs@vger.kernel.org>,
	Trond Myklebust <Trond.Myklebust@netapp.com>,
	Bryan Schumaker <bjschuma@netapp.com>,
	"Martin K. Petersen" <mkp@mkp.net>, Jens Axboe <axboe@kernel.dk>,
	Mark Fasheh <mfasheh@suse.com>, Joel Becker <jlbec@evilplan.org>,
	Eric Wong <normalperson@yhbt.net>
Subject: Re: [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading
Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2013 15:55:26 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20130925195526.GA18971@fieldses.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20130925190620.GB30372@lenny.home.zabbo.net>

On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 12:06:20PM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 03:02:29PM -0400, Anna Schumaker wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Zach Brown <zab@redhat.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Hrmph.  I had composed a reply to you during Plumbers but.. something
> > > happened to it :).  Here's another try now that I'm back.
> > >
> > >> > Some things to talk about:
> > >> > - I really don't care about the naming here.  If you do, holler.
> > >> > - We might want different flags for file-to-file splicing and acceleration
> > >>
> > >> Yes, I think "copy" and "reflink" needs to be differentiated.
> > >
> > > I initially agreed but I'm not so sure now.  The problem is that we
> > > can't know whether the acceleration is copying or not.  XCOPY on some
> > > array may well do some shared referencing tricks.  The nfs COPY op can
> > > have a server use btrfs reflink, or ext* and XCOPY, or .. who knows.  At
> > > some point we have to admit that we have no way to determine the
> > > relative durability of writes.  Storage can do a lot to make writes more
> > > or less fragile that we have no visibility of.  SSD FTLs can log a bunch
> > > of unrelated sectors on to one flash failure domain.
> > >
> > > And if such a flag couldn't *actually* guarantee anything for a bunch of
> > > storage topologies, well, let's not bother with it.
> > >
> > > The only flag I'm in favour of now is one that has splice return rather
> > > than falling back to manual page cache reads and writes.  It's more like
> > > O_NONBLOCK than any kind of data durability hint.
> > 
> > For reference, I'm planning to have the NFS server do the fallback
> > when it copies since any local copy will be faster than a read and
> > write over the network.
> 
> Agreed, this is definitely the reasonable thing to do.

A client-side copy will be slower, but I guess it does have the
advantage that the application can track progress to some degree, and
abort it fairly quickly without leaving the file in a totally undefined
state--and both might be useful if the copy's not a simple constant-time
operation.

So maybe a way to pass your NONBLOCKy flag to the server would be
useful?

FWIW the protocol doesn't seem frozen yet, so I assume we could still
add an extra flag field if you think it would be worthwhile.

--b.

  reply	other threads:[~2013-09-25 19:55 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 62+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2013-09-11 17:06 [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading Zach Brown
2013-09-11 17:06 ` [PATCH 1/3] splice: add DIRECT flag for splicing between files Zach Brown
2013-09-11 17:06 ` [PATCH 2/3] splice: add f_op->splice_direct Zach Brown
2013-09-11 17:06 ` [PATCH 3/3] btrfs: implement .splice_direct extent copying Zach Brown
2013-09-11 21:17 ` [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading Eric Wong
2013-09-16 19:44   ` Rob Landley
2013-09-19 12:59   ` Jeff Layton
2013-09-20  9:49 ` Szeredi Miklos
2013-09-25 18:38   ` Zach Brown
2013-09-25 19:02     ` Anna Schumaker
2013-09-25 19:06       ` Zach Brown
2013-09-25 19:55         ` J. Bruce Fields [this message]
2013-09-25 21:07           ` Zach Brown
2013-09-26  8:58             ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-26 15:34               ` J. Bruce Fields
2013-09-26 16:46                 ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-26 18:06                 ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-26 19:06                   ` Zach Brown
2013-09-26 19:53                     ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-26 21:23                       ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-27  4:47                         ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-27 14:00                           ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-27 14:39                             ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-10-06  8:42                   ` Rob Landley
2013-09-26 18:55               ` Zach Brown
2013-09-26 21:26                 ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-27 20:05                   ` J. Bruce Fields
2013-09-27 20:50                     ` Zach Brown
2013-09-28  5:49                       ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-28 15:20                         ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-28 21:20                           ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 12:20                             ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 14:34                               ` J. Bruce Fields
2013-09-30 14:48                                 ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 14:51                                 ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 14:52                                   ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 15:24                                     ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 14:28                                       ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 15:33                                         ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-30 15:38                                         ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 14:41                                           ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 15:46                                             ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 14:49                                               ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 15:57                                                 ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 16:31                                                   ` Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30 17:17                                                     ` Bernd Schubert
2013-09-30 17:44                                                       ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-30 17:48                                                         ` Bernd Schubert
2013-09-30 18:02                                                           ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-30 18:49                                                             ` Bernd Schubert
2013-09-30 19:34                                                               ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-30 20:00                                                                 ` Bernd Schubert
2013-09-30 20:08                                                                   ` Ric Wheeler
2013-09-30 20:27                                                                     ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-09-30 20:10                                                                   ` Myklebust, Trond
2013-10-01 18:42                                               ` J. Bruce Fields
2013-10-01 19:58                                       ` Zach Brown
2013-10-02 12:58                                         ` Jan Kara
2013-10-02 13:31                                           ` David Lang
2013-12-18 12:41 ` Christoph Hellwig
2013-12-18 17:10   ` Zach Brown
2013-12-18 17:26     ` Anna Schumaker

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