Re: [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading

Miklos Szeredi
2013-09-30T14:51:16Z

On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 4:34 PM, J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org> 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.

Thanks,
Miklos