Re: open(.. O_DIRECT ..) difference in between Linux and FreeBSD ..

[Nuno Silva <nuno.silva@vgertech.com>]

Hi!

OARS, anybody knows a patch that implements O_DIRECT in 2.4 the same way 
that it's implemented in 2.5?

2.5's O_DIRECT is much less restrictive than 2.4's. OTOH 2.5 is still 
not recommended for production use. Any way of having the best of both 
worlds? :)

Thanks,
nuno Silva

Matti Aarnio wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 12, 2003 at 03:58:14PM +0100, Dave Jones wrote:
> 
>> >               Transfer sizes, and the alignment  of  user  buffer
>> >               and  file offset must all be multiples of the logi-
>> >               cal block size of the file system.
>>
>>Just to confirm something that I wrote in the post-halloween-2.5 doc,
>>that doesn't tally with this..
>>
>>- The size and alignment of O_DIRECT file IO requests now matches that
>>  of the device, not the filesystem.  Typically this means that
>>  you can perform O_DIRECT IO with 512-byte granularity rather than 4k.
>>
>>Is this a case of the man pages not following 2.5 yet, or is this
>>incorrect ?
> 
> 
> I think of three things:
>    - 2.4 defines rules in most confusing manner
>    - 2.5 continues that
>    - We need more complete IRIX's O_DIRECT API:
> 
> from open(2):
>      O_DIRECT
>          If set, all reads and writes on the resulting file descriptor will
>          be performed directly to or from the user program buffer, provided
>          appropriate size and alignment restrictions are met.  Refer to the
>          F_SETFL and F_DIOINFO commands in the fcntl(2) manual entry for
>          information about how to determine the alignment constraints.
>          O_DIRECT is a Silicon Graphics extension and is only supported on
>          local EFS and XFS file systems, and remote BDS file systems.
> 
> 
> from fcntl(2):
>      F_SETFL   Set file status flags to the third argument, ....
> 
>             Flags not understood for a particular descriptor are silently
>             ignored except for FDIRECT. FDIRECT will return EINVAL if used
>             on other than an EFS, XFS or BDS file system file.
> 
>      F_DIOINFO Get information required to perform direct I/O on the specified
>             fildes.  Direct I/O is performed directly to and from a user's
>             data buffer. Since the kernels buffer cache is no longer
>             between the two, the user's data buffer must conform to the
>             same type of constraints as required for accessing a raw disk
>             partition.  The third argument, arg, points to a data type
>             struct dioattr which is defined in the <fcntl.h> header file
>             and contains the following members: d_mem is the memory
>             alignment requirement of the user's data buffer. d_miniosz
>             specifies block size, minimum I/O request size, and I/O
>             alignment.  Ths size of all I/O requests must be a multiple of
>             this amount and the value of the seek pointer at the time of
>             the I/O request must also be an integer multiple of this
>             amount.  d_maxiosz is the maximum I/O request size which can be
>             performed on the fildes.  If an I/O request does not meet these
>             constraints, the read(2) or write(2) will return with EINVAL.
>             All I/O requests are kept consistent with any data brought into
>             the cache with an access through a non-direct I/O file
>             descriptor.  See also F_SETFL above and open(2).
> 
> 
>>		Dave
> 
> 
> /Matti Aarnio
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