Re: [RFC] extending splice for copy offloading

Zach Brown
2013-12-18T17:11:57Z

On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 04:41:26AM -0800, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 11, 2013 at 10:06:47AM -0700, Zach Brown wrote:
> > When I first started on this stuff I followed the lead of previous
> > work and added a new syscall for the copy operation:
> >
> > https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/5/14/618
> >
> > Towards the end of that thread Eric Wong asked why we didn't just
> > extend splice. I immediately replied with some dumb dismissive
> > answer. Once I sat down and looked at it, though, it does make a
> > lot of sense. So good job, Eric. +10 Dummie points for me.
> >
> > Extending splice avoids all the noise of adding a new syscall and
> > naturally falls back to buffered copying as that's what the direct
> > splice path does for sendfile() today.
>
> Given the convolute mess that the splice code already is I'd rather
> prefer not overloading it even further.

I agree after trying to weave the copy offloading API into the splice
interface. There are also weird cases that we haven't really discussed
so far (preserving unwritten allocations between the copied files?) that
would muddy the waters even further.

The further the APIs drift from each other, the more I'm prefering
giving copy offloading its own clean syscall. Even if the argument
types superficially match the splice() ABI.

> We can still fall back to the splice code as a fallback if no option
> is provided as a last resort, but I think making the splice code handle
> even more totally different cases is the wrong direction.

I'm with you. I'll have another version out sometime after the US
holiday break.. say in a few weeks?

- z