New copyfile system call - discuss before LSF?

Ric Wheeler
2013-02-21T11:38:10Z

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.

The earliest discussion of such a system call I saw happened back in 2001, I
know we had another more recent flurry (2-3 years back?) as well that got
tangled up and died away.

Given the new popularity of this in storage devices and the use case for virt
guests, any chance to get a proposal floated this year that might be able to
land upstream in our life times :) ?

Ric